CHAPTER THREE

Demand-Side Approaches

Supporting Healthier Food Choices

Sunny S. Kim, Nadia Koyratty, Christine E. Blake, and Neha Kumar

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Understanding the drivers of individual food choices, consumer behavior, and food demand is essential to reshaping food systems

Globally, consumption of most foods has increased, but less than half of adults consume diverse diets, and rising consumption of ultra-processed foods is a concerning trend. Efforts to increase the healthfulness and sustainability of diets must focus on quality — not just quantity — of food production or consumption to achieve optimal nutritional status across diverse populations.
Understanding the drivers of individual food choices, consumer behavior, and food demand is essential to reshape food systems to achieve broad nutrition and sustainability goals. Although many initiatives to transform food systems and promote healthier diets focus on supply-side changes, actions must also focus on the demand-side drivers of food choices.
Creating demand for sustainable healthy diets requires shifting personal and collective food choice behaviors. Demand-side actions can incentivize sustainable production of healthy foods and improve the enabling environment for healthy diets by influencing consumer preferences and increasing purchasing power.
Key actions to shift demand include developing national food-based dietary guidelines that define context-specific diets, and promoting behavior change through consumer empowerment and food and nutrition education.

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs, social protection programs, and school meals and school-based nutrition programs are also proven to improve diets and nutrition outcomes when selected and designed based on the intended objectives and context.

To generate and support demand for sustainable healthy diets, it is important to:

Build understanding of the drivers of food choices, especially the perceptions and values of consumers.
Develop food-based dietary guidelines to help consumers navigate their food environments and make healthy food choices.
Strengthen social and behavior change communication to reach a wide audience and build practical skills that nurture an informed consumer base.
Integrate multisectoral approaches, including agriculture, education, health, and economic policy, within the context of local food systems to help create an enabling environment for healthy food choices.

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