Supervisor(s)

Jean Adams

Programme(s)

Population Health Interventions

Summary

Ultra-processed foods (UPF) have emerged as a key topic of NCD-related concern. Moving away from UPF is likely to require a move towards home- and hand-prepared food and there are newly emerging services which offer this, but they may come at a cost premium. Our previous work exploring the use of online takeaway food delivery services (e.g. JustEat, Deliveroo) providing some of the first global evidence on these topics. Delivery services (e.g Tesco’s Whoosh or through AmazonPrime) offer rapid access to groceries making home prepared food more convenient. Similarly, home-delivered recipe boxes (e.g. Gousto) and meal delivery services (e.g. COOK) provide even more convenience. It remains unknown who has access to these services, who uses them and why, and what their impacts are on diet and health.

This project will aim to generate evidence about who uses home and hand prepared food services and how, and their impacts on health and inequalities.

Students could take this work in multiple directions and will have to fit in with ongoing and emerging reserach in the unit, but potential components could include:

• develop a typology of services and examples in the UK using internet searches and discussions with stakeholders working in food industry umbrella groups, civil society, and government
• web-scrape data on availability, cost and nutritional content of different types of service in different neighbourhoods
• using data from the annual International Food Policy Study explore socio-demographic correlates of use and associations of use with dietary quality and self-reported health outcomes
• use qualitative interview methods to explore why regular users of these services continue to use them