Effect of a Multicomponent Food Pantry Intervention in Client Subgroups

Area of Science:

• Public Health Nutrition
• Health Disparities Research
• Behavioral Science in Food Pantries

Background:

• Nutrition promotion programs can impact health equity.
• Food pantries are crucial access points for low-income populations.
• Understanding intervention effects across diverse groups is essential.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess if the SuperShelf nutrition intervention's impact on diet quality varied by client equity characteristics.
• To determine if SuperShelf exacerbated or mitigated health disparities among food pantry users.
• To analyze differential effects by gender, race/ethnicity, education, and employment status.

Main Methods:

• Secondary analysis of the SuperShelf cluster-randomized trial.
• Inclusion of adult clients from 11 Minnesota food pantries (N=193).
• Diet quality measured using the Healthy Eating Index 2015 (HEI-2015) via 24-hour dietary recalls pre- and post-intervention.
• Linear mixed-effects models used to test interactions between SuperShelf and equity characteristics.

Main Results:

• No significant interactions were found for SuperShelf's effect on diet quality by gender, education, or employment status.
• A significant interaction between SuperShelf and race/ethnicity was observed (p=0.008), but pairwise comparisons within subgroups were non-significant.
• Overall, SuperShelf did not demonstrate differential effects across the examined equity characteristics.

Conclusions:

• The SuperShelf intervention did not worsen dietary disparities among food pantry clients.
• Findings suggest SuperShelf is a potentially equitable approach to improving nutrition in food pantry settings.
• Further subgroup analyses are warranted to fully explore potential racial/ethnic disparities in diet quality outcomes.