Co-construction and evaluation of a health promotion program for healthy food purchasing on a tight budget: The Opticourses workshops

摘要

Opticourses is a multi-partner and participative health promotion program, which was developed with and for socio-economically disadvantaged individuals to improve the nutritional quality of their household food purchases without additional cost. The Opticourses program values foods with good nutritional quality and price using in-store social marketing actions (supply side) and participative workshops based on playful activities about food purchasing practices and nutritional quality, price and taste of foods (demand side). This article presents the co-construction and the evaluation of the demand side of Opticourses. The quantitative evaluation, using experimental economics to limit declarative bias, showed that workshops participation improves experimental food purchases (less calories, less free sugars) without additional cost. The qualitative evaluation revealed positive changes in the type of foods purchased, in purchasing strategies and in culinary practices. This study provides evidence on the effectiveness of the Opticourses workshops.