New Best Practice Guides to drive healthier food retail research

These newly released “how to” resources fill a critical gap by providing a roadmap for researchers, health promotion practitioners, retailers and anyone else involved in planning, conducting, evaluating, or communicating healthy food retail research.  

Responding to the lack of formal guidance for high-quality, rigorous research in this rapidly evolving field, multi-disciplinary experts from the RE-FRESH and RE-FRESH: Next Generation Centres of Research Excellence developed the 16 comprehensive guides — providing the tools and insights needed to generate high-quality evidence and report it consistently, driving meaningful improvements in the healthiness of food retail environments. 

Each guide has been peer reviewed by content experts from Australia and internationally, with a recently published summary of the series in Obesity Reviews describing the process involved. 

Deakin Distinguished Professor Anna Peeters, who led RE-FRESH from 2018 to 2023 when the project began, emphasised the importance of these guides.  

“These guides are an exciting and much-needed resource to guide effective evidence-based approaches to conducting healthy food retail research into the future,” she said. 

“It is a credit to our dedicated researchers to have filled the critical gap, and to be sharing the kind of insights that can only be gained from real-life experience in the field.” 

For more information

Visit the RE-FRESH website ‘Best Practice Guides’ project page for background information on this project and to access the individual guides.

Read the journal article for details on the development and peer-review process of these guides titled: “A best practice guide for conducting healthy food retail research: A resource for researchers and health promotion practitioners.”