How Healthier School Meals Have Changed Grocery Shopping

In effect, it was a giant experiment on the impact of the availability of healthier foods. Detractors of the policy predicted that kids would not like the healthier food, so they either wouldn’t eat it at all, or they would throw most of it away. Empirical evidence of the effect of the HHFKA had been scant, consisting of reports of the number of “meals served” at schools, and studies of participation in small, regional samples of schools.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Kusum Ailawadi, the Charles Jordan 1911 TU’12 Professor of Marketing at Tuck, has bolstered the record substantially. Her paper—“Groceries or School Cafeterias: How Households Respond to School Nutrition Mandates”—was written with Mike Palazzolo of the University of California, Davis; Zoey Hu; and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah of the Scheller College of Business. It is the first to use the NielsenIQ Homescan Panel of household grocery purchases to “estimate changes in quantity and nutritional quality of grocery food purchases that can be attributed to the policy change,” they write.

To do this, they analyzed the changes in the grocery purchases of thousands of households with children across the nation from before to after the law went into effect. Then, they compared those data with the purchases of households without children. Through that analysis, they inferred children’s participation in school meals, and how that participation impacted the nutritional quality of the food those households purchased in the grocery store.

As Ailawadi admits, that’s “a long connection to make.” And yet, the connection was indisputable.

They have three main findings. First, they found that grocery food quantity declined by about 6 percent, due to the HHFKA mandates, which suggests a small but meaningful shift wherein families relied more on the food being provided at school. Relatedly, that decline in grocery purchases was of precisely the kind you might expect among households with kids in school: breakfast and lunch foods. Second, the nutritional quality of the grocery purchases declined slightly, but it was more than offset by the increased healthiness of school meals. And third, they found that the HHFKA especially helped families who were constrained in time and money and whose previous grocery purchases contained less food, and less healthy food. These families were likely outsourcing meals to fast food and other restaurants and preparing fewer meals at home.

For Ailawadi, there are a few key policy takeaways from these findings. “Our results show that the naysayers about making school meals healthier are not supported,” she says. “If that were the case, then kids would come home and eat more, and we didn’t see that in the data.” Another takeaway is that, for households with children, money isn’t the only barrier to providing healthier foods; time is also an important factor. “Time-pressured families changed their purchase patterns even more strongly than financially constrained families did,” Ailawadi says, “and time pressure is not something that policymakers often think about.” Finally, the results show that the healthier food had the biggest impact on the people who needed it most: time and money constrained families whose grocery purchases, prior to HHFKA, were lower in both quantity and nutritional quality.

A lot of research has been done to try to figure out how to get people to eat healthier food. Should we make healthy food less expensive? Should we make unhealthy food more expensive? Should we reduce package sizes of unhealthy foods? Should we highlight low fat and low sugar on the front of packages? None of that has had much success thus far. It turns out that simply putting healthier food in front of kids at school actually does work to improve kids’ diets. And one can hope that it will put kids on a healthier path for the long term. 

“It’s nice to see that improvements in the healthiness of foods will not turn people away,” Ailawadi says. “Whether it’s a school cafeteria, a college cafeteria or even an office cafeteria, making what’s available healthier can make a big difference.”

This story appeared in print in the summer 2025 issue of Tuck Today magazine.