Best Practice Guides for Conducting Healthy Food Retail Research

An innovative series of Best Practice Guides for Conducting Healthy Food Retail Research across all stages of the research process, including practical considerations for engaging with retailers and developing partnerships, co-designing initiatives, data collection and analysis, and research translation.

Global efforts to improve population health are increasingly focused on how to make retail food environments — where people purchase their food — more supportive of healthy diets.

The way that food is promoted, priced and place in store has a huge influence on what we buy and eat. Despite the recognition that research is critically important to encourage healthy retail food environments, no formal guidance has existed on how to conduct high-quality, rigorous research in this field.

Identifying this gap, researchers from the first international centre for healthy food retail research, the RE-FRESH Centre of Research Excellence (2018-2023), embarked on a project to develop a series of best-practice guides for conducting healthy food retail research. These guides are designed to provide researchers and health promotion practitioners with the tools and insights needed to conduct rigorous studies that are both feasible and impactful. Covering each stage of the research process — from building partnerships with retailers and co-designing interventions to analysing data and translating findings into practice – the guides offer practical advice, examples of effective methodologies, and links to real-world case studies.

These guides seek to ensure that future healthy food retail research is grounded in robust methods that deliver reliable results. Moreover, they are peer-reviewed and will be regularly updated to keep pace with evolving evidence and methodologies. Suggestions for future topics or new evidence are welcome — please contact us at re-fresh@deakin.edu.au.

Ultimately, these best practice guides were developed to support researchers to generate high-quality evidence and report it consistently, driving meaningful improvements in the healthiness of food retail environments.

‘These guides are an exciting and much-needed resource to guide effective evidence-based approaches to conducting healthy food retail research into the future. It is a credit to our dedicated researchers to have filled this critical gap, and to be sharing the kind of insights that can only be gained from real-life experience in the field.’
Deakin University Distinguished Professor Anna Peeters, Director of the RE-FRESH CRE 2018-2023, under which the project began. The guides have been released under the 2024-2028 RE-FRESH: Next Generation CRE