Promoting and implementing a healthy eating food program in schools models and encourages positive food language and promotes discussions with children, teachers and the school community. This can help transform attitudes and norms, potentially enhancing children’s fruit and vegetable consumption, build teachers’ food knowledge and skills, and enable systemic change in school settings.
Healthy Eating So Kids Thrive (HESKT) targets vulnerable primary and secondary schools in the Knox and Maroondah local government areas. The program emphasises overall health and presents information about nutrition in a clear and engaging way. It aims to enable students to build healthy food habits and a positive food culture by offering hands on experiences to touch, taste, prepare and grow food.
HESKT’s methodology is informed by the Health Promoting Schools Framework, which incorporates planning, implementation and evaluation, and seeks to address the social determinants of food and education. The model includes face-to-face student education incursions and excursions; student-led decision making and activities; teachers’ capacity building by providing curriculum resources and practical information; supporting schools to introduce food policies to embed a positive food culture in the school and broader school community.

In 2023-24 HESKT’s achievements included:
• 12 schools participated in HESKT
• 888 primary and secondary students were reached
• 78% of students said they liked a new fruit or vegetable
• 61% of students said they liked a new vegetable
• 59% said they tried a new fruit
• 75% of students who participated in the Everyday Lunches program reported being more confident to create a healthy lunch following the program.

These findings indicate that HESKT is making a difference. This program has the potential to be replicated elsewhere to shift current food habits and build positive attitudes and norms to build healthy environments into the future.

Food insecurity is a significant public health concern in Australia, increasing the risk of several physical and mental health conditions, and impacting 3.7 million households in 2023. In Victoria, the prevalence of severe food insecurity more than doubled between 2014 (3.6%) and 2022 (8.1%). The leading response to food insecurity in Australia is the direct provision of food relief, however, barriers such as shame and stigma prevent access.

This desktop review, undertaken at the North Eastern Public Health Unit, aims to support local stakeholders in their consideration of alternative food relief models, by providing a snapshot of the available evidence on social supermarket (SSM) models.

The desktop review included a review of published literature on SSMs, and a web-based search of Australian examples, resulting in final inclusion of 32 research articles and 27 web-based sources.

Overseas, social supermarkets have emerged as an alternative food relief model that provides a more dignified, empowering experience for users. There are varying policy contexts, some of which act as enablers for SSM proliferation, particularly in Europe. SSMs are, however, relatively new in Australia. While multiple definitions exist, in the search for Australian examples, we defined SSMs as those that allow customers the choice of low-cost food in a retail-like environment and beyond this provide some form of social element.

Five SSMs were identified in Australia that met this definition. SSM characteristics varied in several main areas: eligibility; food type, source and pricing strategy; social element; and operations. Limitations of this model include a lack of evaluation evidence and common challenges such as heavy reliance on volunteer staff and unpredictable food donations.

While SSMs may provide more dignity to food-relief users, and offer a good interim strategy, they don’t replace the need for more upstream policy changes addressing the underlying causes of food insecurity.

Introduction: Local food environments impact food access and have been shown to be an independent factor for diet; affecting people’s risk of developing preventable diet-related diseases. However, there is a lack of comprehensive, quantifiable food business information to underpin prevention-based solutions to the complex problem of unhealthy eating and obesity, including in public health and land use planning. To fill this gap, we aimed to develop an online, interactive geospatial tool to map, measure and monitor food access across Western Australian (WA), that could be upscaled nationally.
Methods: Routinely collected WA Local Government (LG) food business data was requested, collated, cleaned, and geocoded to create a uniform centralised geospatial database. Type of food businesses were coded using a fit-for-purpose ‘Nutrition-Focused Food Business Classification Framework’ designed by the research team. The tool’s functionality, format and utility was tested and refined in consultation with the intended user groups (State and LGs) iteratively via workshops.
Results: Based on workshop feedback attended by State and LGs, two dashboards summarising (1) Fast-food; and (2) Fruit and Vegetable access at LG level were created in ArcGIS Pro using the collated food business data. Metrics deemed most important to display were (1) outlet density/10,000 population; (2) percentage of dwellings within 800 metres of outlet; and (3) mean distance (metres) to closest outlet. The prototype has been adopted by WA LGs to start conversations about food access and assist with Public Health Plans.
Conclusion: Our WA Food Atlas prototype has successfully demonstrated ‘proof of concept’ as a valuable online, interactive geospatial tool for visualising and quantifying food access across WA. With funding support from the NHMRC Ideas Grant scheme, our team is now set to expand this tool on a national scale, delivering essential local-to-national geospatial data on food access to inform food regulation, policymaking and surveillance systems.

Access to nutritious, safe and culturally appropriate food is essential to good health and is a basic human right, despite this, there is not equal access across our cities and communities. Local governments (LGs) have emerged as important drivers of food system transformation. They can influence the food available in our neighbourhoods and how we access it. 

As one of nine Victorian Local Public Health Units (LPHUs), the North Eastern Public Health Unit (NEPHU) is providing support and coordinating collective learning opportunities for local governments to drive action on healthier food environments for their communities.   

In 2024 NEPHU partnered with Sustain: The Australian Food Network, to undertake food environment mapping for participating LGAs in the NEPHU catchment using an evidence based systematic methodology. 

Eight out of the 12 LGs in the NEPHU catchment took part in in the mapping project which involved the LGs providing their food business register database as primary data to Sustain. 11 of the 12 LGs attended a Sustain led Community of Practice that was held on a quarterly basis.  

As a result of the food environment mapping, participating LGs received a tailored report with key insights, data and maps of their food retail environments, analysing the availability and distribution of healthy and unhealthy food outlets. NEPHU received a catchment-level report with recommendations to support collective action across the wider food system. 

These LGA-specific reports provide the evidence that LGs need to improve the quality and availability of their local food supply and embed food system strengthening into their Municipal Health and Wellbeing Plans. LGs can use these interactive and visual maps to understand the barriers and enablers to create a healthier local food system. LGs mentioned that the data supported their organisation to prioritise food systems in their planning, including internal resourcing and collaboration opportunities.

Background: Government recently undertook consultation on policy options to improve commercial foods for infants and toddlers (CFIT). A key focus was implementation considerations. Public health organisations suggest that implementation can be swift, within two years, but anticipate that industry will be requesting long timeframes to make any changes. To better understand the feasibility of a short implementation period we investigated changes in the availability of CFIT within the food retail market across the past five years.

Method: A dataset of all CFIT available at one Coles and one Woolworths online store in Sydney, NSW between 2019-2023 was created from PriceTracker. Eligible products included foods listed in the ‘baby’ category. We calculated the number of products available each year, the number of ‘new’ products entering the market each year and the number of products removed from the market each year.

Results: Preliminary results from Woolworths showed that a total of 460 unique products were available over the five-year period, and between 215-289 unique products were available each year. Year-on-year between 171-216 products remained consistently available. Only 110 products were available in all five years. Each year, on average 42.8 products were added to the market each year and 54.5 products were removed. Further analyses are underway to examine change to market availability by category level and to assess whether products that remained stable on the market were reformulated during that period.

Discussion: The market for CFITs is constantly evolving. Our results indicate that products are frequently introduced and removed with less than half of them remaining on the market over a five-year period. Whilst industry may request long implementation periods for any policy changes to these foods, our data suggests that shorter timeframes for industry-initiated changes are very much a part of everyday business and would be feasible and reasonable.