People eat healthier when real-life emojis literally point them to produce

In these modern times, fruits and vegetables have to step up their marketing game.

Beth Mole

Masahiro Ihara

Nearly everyone knows you’re supposed to eat heaping helpings of fruits and vegetables every day. But that doesn’t mean that people actually follow through. In fact, in updated dietary guidelines released in January, the federal government called out nearly everyone for not eating enough produce (as well as eating way too much sugar). But now, researchers have followed up with what may be a simple fix.

In grocery stores, big emojis and arrows on the floor that direct and encourage people to head to the produce section actually got shoppers to buy more produce, researchers report Thursday in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. Moreover, after analyzing grocery bills, the researchers found that shoppers didn’t up their overall shopping budget to accommodate the fresh additions. In other words, grocery store goers weren’t simply piling on crops to their already full carts, but, rather, they were swapping other grocery items for healthy fruits and vegetables.

The findings suggest that adding the minor signage to more stores could be an easy way to get consumers to eat healthier produce. And if so, it “could trigger a public health shift” in a general population that is largely struggling with weight and dietary problems, lead author Collin Payne, of New Mexico State University, said in a statement.

For the study, Payne and colleagues started with just two grocery stores that belonged to the same chain. Both stores were located in zip codes with similar demographics and poverty levels (33 to 44 percent). The researchers first collected two weeks' worth of baseline data for customer shopping habits. One store then acted as the control and the other got the produce-promoting emojis while researchers collected shopping data for another two weeks.

The emojis were large winking smiley faces giving a thumbs up, intended to “facilitate social approval of a desired action,” the authors wrote. Above that approving grin were big green arrows—six feet by three feet—that included text such as “follow the green arrow for health” and then pictures of fruits and vegetables.

In the two weeks with the emojis, shoppers increased their proportion of produce spending by 8 percent compared to baseline, while not altering total food spending.

The researchers repeated the emoji intervention experiment in two more grocery stores, both with different demographics of shoppers than the first stores. After 19 to 25 days, shoppers had boosted their proportion of produce spending by as much as 15 percent.

Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 2016. DOI:10.1016/j.jneb.2016.05.001 (About DOIs).