NCT05672186

Mobile Food Market Cluster Randomized Trial

Evaluating Diet, Food Insecurity, and Food Purchasing Outcomes of a Full-Service Mobile Food Market With a Cluster Randomized Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 262 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Minnesota · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Mobile food markets have been proposed as a strategy for mitigating health disparities related to poor nutrition and diet/weight-related health conditions because they bring low-cost, healthy food directly to underserved populations. Full-service mobile markets may improve multiple aspects of the diet by providing foods to meet all dietary needs through a convenient one-stop shop. The full-service mobile market to be tested (Twin Cities Mobile Market) sells nutritious and staple foods from a bus that regularly visits low-income neighborhoods. Foods are sold at prices \~10% below those of grocery stores. SNAP/EBT is accepted, and a state-funded fruit/vegetable incentive program (Market Bucks) is available to shoppers. Working in partnership with our community team members, we will enroll 12 total sites and recruit 22 participants per site (N=264). We will collect baseline data and randomize sites to either receive the full-service mobile market intervention or serve as the waitlist control. We will then implement the full-service mobile market at intervention sites, follow participants for 6 months, and collect follow-up data. After follow-up data collection, waitlist control sites will receive the full-service mobile market intervention. Diet quality will be assessed through dietary recall interviews, food insecurity will be assessed by survey, and fruit and vegetable purchases will be measured by collecting one month of food purchase tracking forms at baseline and follow-up data collection. Analyses will determine whether the full-service mobile market changes diet quality, food security, and food purchasing outcomes.

Conditions

• Healthy Diet
• Nutrition, Healthy

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Full-service market intervention	Full-service mobile market implementation: the market will visit intervention sites weekly. The market will carry items from all food groups including fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, whole grains, dairy/ dairy substitutes, proteins (e.g., frozen meat/fish, beans, eggs), and dry goods (e.g., cooking oil, spices). Prices on the market are affordable, approximately 10% lower than grocery stores.
OTHER	No intervention	No intervention

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-01-12
• Primary completion: 2025-10-09
• Completion: 2025-10-24
• First posted: 2023-01-05
• Last updated: 2025-10-31

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States