“Finding Healthy Online”: A project to share and initiate research-industrial insight on how online supermarket food environments can support healthier more sustainable diets for consumers

Other investigators

To be announced

Description

Digital food retail environments are used more than ever before and are influencing what people eat as well as public health. To support website design that facilitates healthier and more sustainable food purchases, the project aims to build an academic-industry relationship with nutritionists, psychologists and a digital food retail space (Ocado Retail). Together, we will co-design and conduct initial research which involves eye tracking real-life shoppers, to explore how consumers interact with features of this supermarket website and what influences food choices.

Project keywords

(1) Digital food environments (2) Online supermarkets (3) Eye-tracking (4) Consumer behaviour

Outputs

Published abstract of the novel method protocol, presented at the American Nutrition Society Annual Conference. [Available here: https://cdn.nutrition.org/article/S2475-2991(24)01607-X/fulltext]. The PI is currently preparing a peer-review manuscript for publication targeted at the journal: Public Health Nutrition with the initial findings. Manuscript in preparation entitled "Eye to Mouth: Exploring how people shop for food in real-life in an online supermarket using a novel mixed methods approach including eye tracking". They have also secured funding from the ESRC Leeds Social Sciences Institute Impact Acceleration Account (LSSI IAA) to undertake a Data Science Project aimed at visualising the big data sets (eye tracking data) to describe how people interact with the online supermarket in their real life shots. The LSSI ESRC IAA for this DSP funding is exclusively for the promotion of women in data science, due to the underrepresentation of women in the UK data workforce. This project, focused on data analysis, will continue to run in partnership with Ocado Retail. Several public engagement events have been held in Leeds (June 2024 and July 2024) with members of the public aged 17-21yrs at a session hosted on Campus by Dr Sally Moore at University of Leeds Summer School. In November 2024 the team were awarded ESRC Festival of Science Funding to further support their delivery of an event at Manchester Central Library with the general public, called "Buying Online: Making Healthier Food Choices" which explained, promoted the project and offered experiences using the mobile eyetracker technology. They also sought people's views on the use of eye tracking an associated data collection approaches. A News Item and press release, with photos, is available here: https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/food-nutrition/news/article/5876/how-do-people-shop-for-food-online The initial findings were presented at a symposium on Digital Food Retail Environments at the Canadian Nutrition Society, on May 10th 2025. A new collaboration was initiated with Professor Oyinlola Oyebode and Professor Thijs van Rens during their SALIENT project. The team plan to jointly collaborate on further analysing transcript data (n=10 participant verbalisations) and host a conference/symposium at Leeds/Manchester on online food shopping in September. In addition, Dr Yael Benn will host the team at MMU to show the eye tracking technology and early data analysis stages. For more information see the project website here https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/food-nutrition-research-innovation/dir-record/research-projects/1893/finding-healthy-online

Email contact

s.moore2@leeds.ac.uk