From Cafeteria to Cart: How Healthier School Meals Reshape Household Grocery Shopping

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A household’s food decisions are influenced by a number of factors, not the least of which is the food served in school cafeterias. So what happens when these meals suddenly change? A Journal of Marketing Research study examines how households responded when a major policy—the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA)—made school meals significantly healthier. The policy created a unique opportunity to observe real-world behavior, as the overall quality of a major source of meals for school-aged children improved overnight. This allowed the authors to study how families adjust their everyday food choices in response to this shift.

Using nationally representative household purchase data, the authors show that healthier school meals led families to substitute away from grocery shopping, with grocery calories declining by about 6%. This reduction is concentrated in foods typically purchased for children and in breakfast and lunch categories, providing strong evidence that households shifted toward school meals.

Healthier school meals led families to substitute away from grocery shopping, with grocery calories declining by about 6%.

Importantly, the response is not uniform: time-constrained and financially constrained households show the strongest shifts, suggesting that healthier, more convenient options can meaningfully change behavior for those facing the greatest barriers to healthy eating.

At the same time, the nutritional quality of groceries purchased declined slightly, though this reduction is small relative to the substantial improvements in school meal quality. Taken together, the findings highlight an important insight: changes in the food environment can reshape behavior even without directly targeting preferences. For policymakers, the results suggest that stricter nutrition standards not only made school meals healthier but also more attractive, even without expanding eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. More broadly, the study points to a key implication: rather than discouraging reliance on convenience foods, a more effective approach may be to make healthy and convenient options more readily available.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with the authors of this research, who kindly offered additional insights into their motivations, managerial implications, and avenues for future research:

Q: What inspired you to study how households respond to healthier school meals? Was there an observation or gap in the literature that motivated this project? 

A: This was actually an idea given to us by our coauthor’s wife, Adi Pattabhiramaiah. She just wanted to know the answer to the research question, so we decided to look into it. When we started digging, we realized that existing research on the HHFKA had focused almost entirely on the healthiness of school meals themselves, with very little work on how households changed their own grocery shopping in response. That gap made us even more eager to pursue the question.

Q: Many critics predicted that making school meals healthier would reduce participation. Your results show the opposite. What surprised you most about how households responded to healthier school meals? 

A: I think what surprised us was that they responded at all. Food choices are so inertial, and getting people to change their habits is so hard that we would not have been surprised if no change occurred. And yet it did! We see a meaningful 6% decline in grocery food quantity, driven disproportionately by items typically purchased for children and by breakfast and lunch categories, which is exactly what you would expect if households were substituting toward school meals. That pattern, combined with the fact that participation did not fall, runs counter to the popular narrative at the time that kids would simply reject healthier food.

Q: This paper is set in a policy context (the HHFKA) that many readers may not be deeply familiar with. How did you think about balancing the need to clearly explain the institutional details and identification strategy, while keeping the focus on the broader behavioral insights and contributions to the literature? 

A: The truth is that earlier drafts probably had too much policy context. In each round of the revision, the review team asked us to shorten the paper and (basically) get to the point faster. It was difficult precisely because we wanted to make sure readers were familiar with the setting before we presented our analyses. In hindsight, the key was to trust the reader to fill in some of the institutional details on their own and to devote more space to what makes the paper distinctive: the heterogeneity in household responses and what it tells us about why certain types of households shifted more than others. In this case, we probably did not think about balancing the different pieces of information as much (in the earlier stages of the paper); luckily, the review team was very helpful, and their feedback helped us identify what was important and what was not.

Q: You find a small decline in the nutritional quality of grocery purchases. Do you think this reflects short-term substitution, or could it indicate longer-run habit formation in household shopping? For example, might households get accustomed to relying on school meals and continue purchasing less healthy groceries even when school is not in session? 

A: It’s always hard to say where a small effect is coming from when substitution is involved. Here, the changes are at least in part due to what is being removed from the shopping basket as families shift toward school meals, though there could also be conscious changes to the remaining items in the shopping basket as well. We can’t precisely disentangle those two effects in the data. With that said, the point we make in the paper is important: the effect is really tiny compared to the relative boost in nutrition households would get by substituting toward school meals. Our calculations show that post-HHFKA school breakfasts and lunches scored 70 and 76 on the Healthy Eating Index, compared to just 42 for the displaced groceries. So even with a small negative spillover at the grocery store, the net effect on children’s diets is almost certainly positive.

Q: You explore how factors like education, time, and financial constraints shape household behavior. Another factor that comes to mind is access to healthy food options. Do you think access to healthy food, such as living in areas with limited supermarket availability, could also play an important role? How did you decide which mechanisms to emphasize? 

A: We did not really look into that largely because prior research (see reference below) found that access accounts for very little of the difference in food choices between low- and high-income households. Allcott et al. (2019) estimate that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households closes only about 10% of the nutritional gap, with the remaining 90% driven by demand-side factors like preferences and nutrition knowledge.

Moreover, our empirical model includes household fixed effects and county-by-month fixed effects, which absorb time-invariant location characteristics (such as proximity to supermarkets) and any time-varying county-level demand factors, respectively. Since we also exclude households that moved during the study period, food-access differences across locations are effectively controlled for in our estimates.

As for which mechanisms to emphasize, we focused on time constraints, financial constraints, and nutrition literacy because those are the three drivers most consistently linked to both school meal participation and grocery food quality in the prior literature.

Q: Your findings suggest that changes in school meal programs can reshape household food purchasing behavior. What lessons can policymakers and food companies draw from this, and do you think similar effects would hold in other settings beyond schools? 

A: One of the biggest takeaways was that time-constrained households, who tended to buy less food at the grocery store, were the biggest shifters. This indicates that there is currently an underserved demand for food options that are both healthy and convenient. We could not unequivocally prove that households that purchase less at the grocery store are those that source a lot of pre-made food from external sources (like restaurants) because they value convenience. Still, those households will not need to purchase as much food from the grocery store as other households. Relatedly, some states are starting (or trying) to allow food assistance to be spent on “hot” foods, as are some members of Congress (the bipartisan Hot Foods Act is currently before Congress), because making eating healthy more convenient (even if one has to pay for the labor going into food preparation) may move the needle in a way that is beneficial to society. Our findings support this direction: Rather than expecting time-pressed families to cook more at home, making nutritious prepared options more accessible may be the more effective lever.

References

Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dubé, Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, and Molly Schnell (2019), “Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134 (4), 1793–844.

Mike Palazzolo, Zoey Hu, Kusum Ailawadi, and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah (2025), “Groceries or School Cafeterias: How Households Respond to School Nutrition Mandates,” Journal of Marketing Research, 62 (4), 565–81.

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