2019 CAFLP Annual Conference Panel Recap: “Access to Good Food: Food Boxes, Corner Stores and Beyond”

"Bodega Portraits" by Melissa Gorman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The first presentation was by Laetitia Eyssartel from FoodShare Toronto on the Good Food Box program. The single best predictor of food insecurity is household income. It is important though to note that 62% of food insecure households work, so food insecurity is not limited to people who do not work.

The Good Food Box was a model that FoodShare Toronto started in the 1990s and was an attempt to model a food system that worked for everyone. An assessment was undertaken of the Good Food Box in 2007. in this assessment, it was discovered that the box was not sustainable, and that over time, sales had decreased causing the gap between the sale price and the cost to widen. Furthermore, in 1995, 43% of respondents had an annual income of less than $20 000 and 7% of more than $70 000. By 2007, 16% of respondents had an annual income of less than $20 000 and 33% of respondents had an income of more than $70 000.

This led to a restructuring of the Good Food Box. Although it is still subsidized for organizations, it is now a social enterprise which only does door to door deliveries for individuals who buy the box at the full cost. This was just launched in January 2019, and so far, they have seen an increase in sales.

The second presentation was by Meghan Lynch from the University of Toronto on research done in conjunction with Ottawa Public Health to evaluate the effect of putting healthy food into corner stores.

The Good Food pilot program ran from 2017 – 2018 with 8 stores participating. The program required that they sell a minimum variety of healthy foods at affordable prices, promote the sale of healthy foods, maintain a clean and attractive premise and adhere to all food safety and tobacco vending legislation.

Meghan conducted semi-structured interviews to evaluate how the pilot program worked from the views of the corner store owners. From these interviews, she found that there were three main challenges that presented themselves to those involved: (1) no wholesale supplier/delivery, (2) uniqueness of fruits and vegetables, and (3) competition with other retailers.

Overall, corner store owners had to put a lot more time, energy and money into sourcing food and found that there was a lot of food waste. They also found that they weren’t able to compete price-wise with grocery stores. The question that Meghan then posed to the audience was: Do we need a systemic change in the food supply chain to make selling fresh fruits and vegetables in corner stores effective?

The third and final presentation was by Cathy Mah from Dalhousie University on retail food environments research and implications for the law as a tool for achieving public health.

When we think about diet, a lot of the focus tends to be on individual dietary choices, but no one makes these choices in a bubble. First, environments are multi-level and there are many steps between environments and diet-related health outcomes. But also, humans move in environments, environments are social, and humans are social. This makes measuring the relationship between the community food environment and peoples’ diets and dietary choices really hard.

In 2016 and in 2019, Cathy did an examination of Canadian retail food environment studies. She found that there is a continued reliance on information to consumers to change their behaviour and this misses retailers as a target. Only a third of these studies looked at the law or policy as an enabling tool or structure, and 40% focused on intervention levers that fall within municipal jurisdiction.

Not one study measured the economic effects for the retailer when looking at the effect on diet-related outcomes, and if there was a business outcome in the study, it was commercial viability. We need more studies across scales looking at regions, mobility and time. We also need to take the perspective of the retailer and retailer eco-system in as well, and then look at how law could be used as a tool.

Overall, these studies showed that research and programs aimed at assessing access to food encounter complex variables that are difficult to account for.