NCT05061888

Free Living Food Waste Management and Diet Quality Improvement Using Smart Intervention and Food Image Application

Using the FoodImageTM App to Assess Smart Interventions Designed to Improve Nutrition & Reduce Food Waste

• Status: Active Not Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 46 (actual)
• Sponsor: Pennington Biomedical Research Center · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 62 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The primary aim of this study is to reduce household food waste and improve individual nutrition. This will be achieved using the FoodImageTM smartphone app 1, a novel method for measuring household food acquisition, food intake, and food waste decisions, to assess the efficacy of a smart intervention that targets food waste reduction and diet quality improvement. The intervention is designed to improve nutrition by offsetting intake of less nutritious foods with increased fresh fruit and vegetable (FV) intake while simultaneously reducing household food waste via strategies tailored to participating households.

Detailed description

Data collected will be used to: 1. Test the effects of free FV provision on: (a) household food waste levels, (b) total FV acquisition (free FV provision plus purchases post-intervention vs. pre-intervention FV purchases), and (c) the consumption of FV (Food Patterns Equivalents Database, FPED). We hypothesize that free FV provision will increase food waste, total FV acquisition, and diet quality (increase the Healthy Eating Index \[HEI\]). We will test these hypotheses by comparing baseline and follow-up data from participants randomly assigned to the control condition, which features free FV provision and a placebo (stress management) intervention not focused on food waste. Exploratory analyses will examine the effects on dietary energy intake and if the freely provided FV replace non-FV foods in the baseline diet. 2. Test if a smart intervention to reduce food waste and replace less healthy foods with FV significantly reduces post-intervention food waste compared to the control group while increasing FV acquisition and consumption compared to pre-intervention baseline. We hypothesize that this smart intervention will increase total FV acquisition and FV consumption compared to baseline, and these increases are not expected to differ significantly from control. It is further hypothesized that those receiving the smart intervention will significantly reduce food waste compared to controls. Exploratory analyses will examine the extent to which the smart intervention had the intended effect of replacing less healthy foods with FV consumption.

Conditions

• Diet, Healthy

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Smart Intervention for Food Waste Management and Replacing current diet with Fruits and Vegetables	Will receive a Smart Intervention on Food Waste Management and replacing less healthy foods with fruits and vegetables.
OTHER	Smart Intervention for Stress Management	Will receive a Smart Intervention on stress management practices and strategies.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-08-23
• Primary completion: 2022-11-23
• Completion: 2025-12-30
• First posted: 2021-09-30
• Last updated: 2025-08-13
• Results posted: 2025-08-13

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States