Development of a Tool for Reporting Key Dietary Indicators from Sales Data in Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Stores

TL;DR

A web-based tool was developed to help remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community stores track and improve dietary health through sales data.

Contribution

A novel web-based reporting tool was created to support healthier food retailing in remote Indigenous communities.

Findings

The tool provides key dietary indicators aligned with Australian Dietary Guidelines.

Stakeholders found the reports visually clear and useful for decision-making.

Challenges included defining healthiness classifications and ensuring report accessibility.

Abstract

Reporting key dietary indicators from sales data can help us guide store decision makers in developing effective store policy to support healthier customer purchases. We aimed to develop a web-based reporting tool of key dietary indicators from sales data to support health-promoting policy and practice in stores in geographically remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Tool development included identifying key dietary indicators (informed by sales data from 31 stores), community consultation (19 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander store directors and two store managers) and a web-build. Tool evaluation involved feedback interviews with stakeholders (25 store managers and two nutritionists). Key dietary indicators aligned with Australian Dietary Guideline food groupings and recommendations. An online portal for accessing and customising reports was built. Stakeholder feedback indicated that the strengths of the reports were the visuals, ease of interpretation, providing information that was not currently available and potential to increase capacity to support healthy food retailing. Difficulties were defining healthiness classification with alignment to other nutrition guidelines used and ensuring reports reached relevant store decision makers. This tool may be valuable to support store decision makers in identifying and prioritising nutrition issues and optimising the health-enabling attributes of stores.

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