Investigating the short and long-term effects of "nutritional-score" pricing on food pantry selections

Approximately one out of ten households in the U.S. experienced food insecurity in 2019 (U. S. Department of Agriculture, 2020). Food pantries have taken on an important role in helping those with both short term and persistent food insecurity. As pantries are increasingly being arranged to allow clients to choose their own food, the question of how to encourage healthy choices is becoming an important topic for discussion. The Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC) implemented a "Nutritional-Score" program on September 1, 2017 as an experiment aimed at answering the above question. This program essentially changes the budgets of food pantry clients to make healthier choices cheaper and less healthy choices more expensive. We perform a Bayesian analysis using a zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) model to help describe the effects of this program on the frequency with which clients choose less healthy items. We find evidence that the Nutritional-score program had a positive effect on the probability of rejecting less healthy items in the short and long term.