The Sales Impact of Featuring Healthy Foods, Indulgent Foods, or Both: Findings from a Large-Scale Retail Field Study

Abstract

It is well documented that featuring foods increases their sales. However, little is known about whether there are spillover effects of featuring one food type (healthy or indulgent) on sales of the nonfeatured food type, or about the effect of jointly featuring both food types. A large-scale field study (N=7,510 transaction baskets in 12 convenience stores) examined these questions in the context of altering which food type(s) were displayed on a store endcap. The authors obtained several key findings. First, featuring foods had a large effect on increasing featured-food sales (+50.3% for indulgent foods, +34.5% for healthy foods). Second, featuring healthy foods had no statistically significant spillover effect on indulgent-food sales, while featuring indulgent foods had a marginally significant negative spillover effect on healthy-food sales (−12.9%). Finally, jointly featuring both healthy and indulgent foods only statistically significantly increased indulgent-food sales (+41.4% for indulgent foods, +9.2% for healthy foods).