Laying out food pantries like grocery stores gives choice and can lead to healthy habits
Julie Saqueton is looking forward to the end of the pandemic for a lot of reasons. She’s ready to get back to hosting girls’ nights out and senior field trips in person, along with the other community services St. Philip’s School & Community Center provides in South Dallas.
She’s ready to get back to giving people choices.
Saqueton is the chief community advancement officer at St. Philip’s, which runs Aunt Bette’s Community Pantry inside a small, efficiently run building that used to be a liquor store, inconveniently located next to the facilities where St. Philip’s would host after-school programs. St. Philip’s took over the building in 2015 and expanded their limited food box distribution to a fully operational client choice food pantry, lined with tidy shelves stocked with breakfast cereal, condiments, and grains. A refrigerated section along the back wall houses the produce, meat and dairy.
“We were able to acquire this building and turn it into a dignified shopping experience,” Saqueton says.
Patrick Stevens, 53, rides a bike to the pantry, which he calls a “blessing.” He can barely walk, and making the mile trek to the pantry twice a month used to take hours. The folks at St. Philip’s noticed and surprised him with a bike. While choice wasn’t his primary concern, Stevens noted that it’s nice to have.
“You got the variety of food. Meats. Canned goods.” Stevens says, referring to how he shopped at Aunt Bette’s before the pandemic. “You went around and you got to choose.”
Not only did Aunt Bette’s have the basics but the pantry also had some of the more specific items he needs, like Ensure.
In non-pandemic times, St. Philip’s 750 family clients come in during an appointed shopping time, choose their groceries, and go to the checkout counter just like they would at a retail grocer. Instead of cash, the clients’ groceries are deducted from their bi-weekly allotment of food — a calculation based on the size and composition of their household.
Stevens may not have been conscious of the effect, but by laying out the pantry like a grocery store and offering choices to hungry neighbors, experts say choice-based food pantries create the kind of positive psychological environment conducive to healthy consumer habits. This emerging trend of choice in food pantries is turning into a best practice.
During the pandemic, the team had to shift their distribution model, moving to a pre-bundled food box drive-through. They’ve been operating in an emergency model, Saqueton explains, which opens distribution to people outside their client-base in zip codes 75210 and 75215. Anyone who drives up can get a box. The pandemic put a vice-like squeeze on families, so Saqueton was glad to be able to help as many as possible, but she was sad to see the shopping experience change. She’s ready to get people back to selecting the food they want — food they will prepare, eat and enjoy.
The North Texas Food Bank, Aunt Bette’s primary supplier, considers the pantry an exemplar. Client choice pantries minimize waste, advocates say, because people aren’t given food they can’t eat or don’t know how to prepare.
“[Aunt Bette’s] was one of the first collaborative efforts with the food bank to build a model pantry,” says North Texas Food Bank community partnership specialist John Murray, who manages St. Philip’s program. The food bank and Toyota consulted with the pantry to streamline the space and create a system that would minimize wait times and keep storage and operations from spilling out into the shopping area.
“It gives the client the feel of worth,” Murray says. “You’re not just herding them through like cattle. What you’re providing for them is more than just food, but to say to them, ‘You’re another human being, so we’re going to treat you that way.’ ”
Offering choice also might be helping Aunt Bette’s shoppers walk away with healthier food in hand.
In the Journal of Consumer Research, Daniel Mochon explored what he called “single option aversion.” He found that when given only one option, consumers were highly likely, around 90%, to pass on that option and search for a better one elsewhere. While the experiment didn’t account for the added incentive of Aunt Bette’s groceries being free, it does show that when only one option is given, it tends to diminish a shopper’s investment in the choice.
No strategy has entirely overcome the appeal of junk food or the time and money it takes to purchase and prepare delicious home cooked meals, but personal investment of choice-making seems to be essential, says Yale researcher Zoe Chance. She has studied various efforts to entice people to eat healthier, everything from limiting options to increasing options, from education to incentive programs. Some strategies — researchers call them “nudges” — work better than others to make healthy options more appealing.
The national food bank chain Feeding America partnered with Cornell University to study the effect of nudging food pantry clients while giving them choice. Nutrition information and the appealing display of food around the store increased the likelihood that food pantry clients would choose healthier foods by 46%.
What they didn’t do was take away all unhealthy choices. Maintaining the element of choice is inherent to most successful nudges in most contexts.