UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
APRIL 6, 2017
2:00 P.M. CST
SMALL STEPS, BIG LEAPS:
HEALTHY VENDING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
Services provided by:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
800‑825‑5234
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This text is being provided in a realtime format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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> JASMINA SISIRAK: Welcome everyone, this is Jasmina Sisirak. We will begin our webinar in about three minutes.
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> Welcome everyone, it is 2:00 p.m. central. My name is Jasmina Sisirak, and we will begin. Welcome to our first HealthMatters of community webinar series. I'm going to hit record because we will be recording this webinar, and also, we will be open captioning at this moment, too.
All right. Record.
For people that don't‑‑ that could not make it to today's webinar, we will make sure that so we post our PowerPoints and any resources we've talked about during this webinar, and also recording, so that it can be viewed at a later time.
Again, I just wanted to put a couple of pictures of the presenters so you can put our faces with our voices. I am the assistant Associate Director of the HealthMatters Program, and we're also stationed at the rehabilitation training center at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I recognize many of your names on this webinar and some of your new names, so hopefully you can learn a little bit about us by visiting our website. I’ll let my colleague, Kristin Krok introduce herself briefly and we will begin. Kristin Krok Krok?
> Hi, everyone, this is Kristin Krok, I work at NorthPointe Resources which is in Illinois very close to the Illinois/Wisconsin boarder. Northpoint is a community‑based organization. We work very closely with the HealthMatters team with Jasmina and her colleague Beth, and I'm pleased we're having the series and am very pleased to talk to you later in the webinar.
> JASMINA SISIRAK: Thank, Kristin Krok Krok. Just a little bit of housekeeping, if you have any questions, please put them in question and answer or a chat box, preferably toward the end of the presentation, we will be presenting about 40 minutes and then we will leave some time for you to ask questions, and we also want you to share some ideas if you have‑‑ if your organization has implemented healthier vending options or any of the other suggestions that you may have.
Today we're not promising that we will be resolving our healthy vending dilemma, but really wanted to make you aware of resources that have been developed, and some research that's showing some sort of promising approaches.
And also, please share your stories.
So, the goals for today, we want to give you some steps to develop healthy vending machine initiative, provide you with some tools to survey vending machines and implement new guideline, and kind of involve your staff and people that you support in these decision‑making pieces, and then provide you with research news. Kristin Krok will talk about a real-life case study from her organization, how they have turned around their vending services, and then again, encouraging you to share your stories.
A little bit of a background, why focus on healthy vending. Adults on average spend a third of their day at work, snacking, eating meal, consuming beverage, and vending is often times a part of your nutrition, and vending usually contains mainly, for the most part, processed food options that are usually high in fat, salt, and sugar, which is very tasty to us, and then the fresh food is rarely available.
So, these environmental factors, location, convenience, are and the taste of these foods are creating a perfect storm for poor nutritional intake which is putting us at risks and looking at dietary risks, the number one cause of preventable mortality. So, we really want to focus on these pieces.
I really want to focus on sugar‑sweetened beverages for a couple of slides. They're no longer considered a treat, but a regular contributor of daily calories and not even in moderation. They play a significant role in current obesity trends, and 10% of daily calories consumed by Americans in an average U.S. diet is coming from sugar‑sweetened beverages. 53% of adults and 83% of youths consume at least one sugar‑sweetened beverage each day, which on average ends up being about 46 gallons per year per person, and this is only looking at sodas or soft drinks and not necessarily thinking about other sugar‑sweetened beverages that you may be consuming.
So, what is a sugary drink? Sodas and soft drinks, fruit drinks or punches, and aids. Sports drinks are considered sugary drinks, energy drinks, flavored milks and teas and coffee drinks with caloric sweetener.
And this is the last promised slide about sugary drunks. They are really a leading contributor to obesity in both children and adults. The link is especially strong in children where each daily serving of sugar‑sweetened beverage is associated with at least 60% increase risk of obesity.
Added sugar contains no essential nutrients and it's bad for your teeth. There are no proteins, essential fats, vitamins or minerals in sugar, it's just pure energy. And when people eat up to 10 to 20 percent of their calories as sugar, this becomes a major problem and contributes to nutrient deficiencies.
Added sugar is high in fructose, which is overload your liver and cause a non‑alcoholic fatty liver disease, and evidence is really arising that it's showing that the fat that is the sugar that raises your cholesterol and gives you heart disease and not the fat.
So, it's really something to think about. Sugar can cause insulin resistance, which is a stepping stone towards metabolic syndrome and diabetes, and insulin resistance can progress to Type II Diabetes. And if anything, really focusing on those sugary drinks could be your stepping stone to healthier vending.
Obesity epidemic, the sugar in vending really is contributing to the rising obesity epidemic in the United States. 72 million adults are overweight or obese, 27 of the rise in healthcare are associated with increase in obesity rates. Adults with disability, their obesity rates, the studying show higher or equal to the general population, and having a healthy employee is really having a more productive workforce, healthier.employees miss less work, that's fewer health care costs, experience fewer injuries and accidents and have better moral.
So organizations can make a difference in the health of your employees and people that you support, so providing opportunities for healthy eating is really crucial in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity. Employees can implement policy systems and environmental initiatives that make healthy food more affordable, accessible, and appealing.
So, that was a little bit about background and why we decided to do this vending machine presentation. We have worked with hundreds of different organizations throughout over 15 years of working in HealthMatters, and one of the consistent, sort of, troubles and sort of issues that people talk about are vending and trying to figure out how you can come up with some healthier vending solutions.
We also had a survey, and surveyed over 240 community‑based organizations providing services to people with mental disabilities, and we asked them about their vending, (developmental disabilities, and we asked them about their vending, and this slide really shows the information. About 40% of the organizations had vending services, but only 30% of them had fruit, low‑fat snacks or other healthy food alternatives in their vending machines, about 64% of them had healthy beverage alternatives, 14% only had labels that identified healthy foods on or near vending machine, and only about a quarter of them had labels indicating nutritional value provided on or near vending machines.
So, there is definitely room for improvement, and then the top of this graph is the Wellness Committee. We asked organizations how many of you have a wellness committee, and out of 241, only 18% had a wellness‑‑ only 41 had a wellness committee, so just thinking about your organizational wellness, starting somewhere would be to create a wellness committee or even call it a vending committee to start working through some of these issues.
So what do we do with this? We want to make change. This slide is really going to‑‑ I'm just going to run it down and then I will delve into each one of these bullet points, so we really want to get the organizational commitment for healthier vending, build that leadership team, either through a wellness committee or vending committee, or you can just build a team. You don't have to call it a committee. Gather information to understand what's going on with your vending services, develop implementation plans, implement the change and then evaluate.
Before I talk about, kind of, getting organized, we do get a lot of people saying there are some challenges. There is resistance to change and staff and people with disabilities saying, this is my right to choose what I want to eat from there, but that is something that we want to work on by bringing people to the table and communicating and collaborating together to come up with a vending that is agreeable for the most people.
A lot of times we get people saying, if we change vending to a healthier vending solution, the cost of those items may go up, or the vendor may be complaining that they won't be making enough money at those machines.
A little bit about what research shows in regards to that. I added‑‑ there have been dozens of studies in the last 20 years on vending in organizations, and I just put a couple of them that were kind of the most interesting ones.
Also, there was a study done reviewing all of the research that has been done and they have really found out that price reductions were most effective overall to actually make a change to a healthier vending. Meaning, if you reduce the price of those healthier food items you're bound to have more accept acceptance for healthier vending.
However, the revenues did not substantially change regardless of intervention, of what people were doing to make the vending healthier. That's very promising and exciting so when you go back to your vendor, you can really tell them about your research and say that the revenues usually don't change.
So, looking at a couple of these studies, the most recent one is this Rush University Medical Center study, and it was shown or featured on NPR about a week ago, and what they used was a device that fits inside of a vending machine and waits for 25 seconds before releasing the typical snack versus that healthier type like peanuts or popcorn, they drop instantly.
It was interesting that they found that people that were forced‑‑ and there was a sign posted that, for your less healthy option, you will have to wait 25 extra seconds, so people were opting out to choose healthier snacks because they did not want to wait those 25 extra seconds.
They also added a 25 cent tax on unhealthy snacks, and then they showed that the combination of increasing the price of unhealthy snacks and also waiting for that unhealthy snack resulted in a greater increase in healthier food options from that vending, so that was pretty exciting.
This is the newest research. There was just‑‑ it was just published a week ago, so but it's something to think about.
The Minnesota (?) Study and the CHIP study also used‑‑ they reduced the prices of different can healthier or low‑fat snacks and that also showed that it improved the, the consumption of healthier food or a healthier snack alternative.
So, it's a promising way of making people eat a little bit healthier.
So going back, again, to thinking about how to move toward a healthier vending machine initiative, one of the pieces you should do is to administer a vending machine inventory, and there inventory‑‑ and I'll show you the one‑‑ we really utilized some really great resources and we'll share and post them on the site so you don't have to be taking any of these notes.
King County Healthy Vending Implementation toolkit, it had a really nice comprehensive resource list and toolkits and things that they've developed, so with this inventory, locking at‑‑ what you want to really look at is frequency, preference, interest in healthier options, and price points.
So, let me just show you one of these, sort of, samples. It's a quick survey. You can administer it to your staff and people with disabilities and to understand how often people utilize the vending machines, what types of snacks they buy the most, and if there were healthier alternative, which ones they would probably buy, and how much are they willing to pay for?
So it's a really nice way of gathering information and being able to talk to your vendor or vending supplier to kind of think through some of those changes.
Once you've done the inventory, reporting the inventory results to the management, and then really thinking about requesting some improvements and being specific with those.
And also, another step is to meet with the person that's responsible for vending services in contracts. This is very important, without their buy‑in, you would, obviously, go nowhere, so just bringing that person to the table.
And then once you meet with them, introducing the idea of healthy vending and requesting a list of available healthy items or healthy programs from your vending company. Often times a vendor will have some healthy program initiatives as well, so it's an important one to ask.
The next step is to develop an implementation plan. So, what does a healthy vending machine look like? There are a lot of resources showing those. I'm just going to skip‑‑ so there is a lot of sample nutritional guidelines that you can find. We've just given you some of these that come from Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the American Heart Association, so it really depends what your vending inventory says where you can start thinking about some of these nutritional guidelines and implementing.
Also, the King County Healthy Vending Initiative toolkit has a really nice table where you can actually go down the list of fruits and veggies and grains and nuts and seeds and dairy and beverages and understanding what's the healthiest choice, healthier, and limited, and so if you can't get all items to be healthiest and healthy, you can look at some of these limited option, too.
So that's‑‑ there is your resource for thinking how it looks in vending.
Voicing your choice, it's all important to educate people and people with disabilities about making those healthier choices from vending machine, and how you do that is really bringing them to the table and introducing them to some of these new new choices that you want to possibly implement in your vending. So, there is a really nice resource, Indiana University did a Taste and Tell Vending Initiative where they asked their consumers to rate the different healthy snacks that they were planning on implementing, and from there they made decisions on which vending machines should have different types of snacks, so doing a taste test, and Kristin Krok will talk about that in her organization, they've done things like that to really bring people to participate in this decision‑making.
And then lastly, and most importantly is to adopt a healthy vending policy. Without that policy, a written policy, you don't really have anything to support your initiative.
There are a lot of different sample vending policies available online. This is just one of them. It's just a nice tool how you can kind of think about how you're doing a healthy vending initiative or policy and what the nutrition standards are and the beverage standards, and then pricing and placement standards.
So, you can utilize some of these vending policies to really implement them and adapt them. So the next step is to implement the change. You will be negotiating with a vendor to increase the number of healthier choices available. So, depending how you are set up with the vendor, there is a sample letter to vendor that you can use, or if you're meeting with a vendor, you can be doing some of these things face to face.
Also, another great idea is to start placing signs and sample health messages on or around the vending machines promoting healthier choices, and these resources that are around, they have a bunch of them with the King County vending Initiative. This one you see on the slide I made in 10 minute, it's a really nice one. It's a really nice way of alerting people and staff and people with disabilities about thinking about your health messaging and making them aware of the changes.
And then, sometimes organizations are not necessarily completely ready to tackle vending machine, but you can do some other small steps. So even thinking about Rethink your Drink Campaign, thinking about changing what the choice is people are making, even before they get to that vending machine.