Healthy Retail

Accessible & affordable stores with nutritious, healthful options

ChangeLab Solutions thinks it’s important to take a comprehensive approach to improving retail environments. When public health practitioners in different agencies and issue areas — such as tobacco control, nutrition, and prevention of excessive alcohol use — work together, they can help create stores where it’s easy to make healthy choices.

Stores can have a significant impact on community health. In many places, residents lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables but can find cheap tobacco and alcohol all too easily. This imbalance has serious health consequences. In the United States, tobacco use, poor nutrition, and excessive alcohol use are among the leading causes of preventable deadly illness, including cancer, heart disease, and chronic lower respiratory disease. Communities of color and low-income areas often have the fewest healthy stores and bear the greatest burden of these illnesses.

Stores that make the healthy choice the easy choice — by stocking nutritious items and deemphasizing tobacco and junk food, for instance — can help improve community health. Strategies include providing and promoting affordable fruits and vegetables, water, and other nutritious products. Tobacco, sugary drinks, unhealthy food, and alcohol are less visible or perhaps not sold at all.

We’ve created tools to help you figure out what healthy stores might look like in your community and to support your efforts to make them a reality.

Healthy Retail Tools
Healthy Retail Tools for Policy & Partnership
This collection includes a playbook, a policy poster, a set of conversation starters, and a collaboration workbook to help you improve your local retail environment.
Check Out Healthy Retail
Check Out Healthy Retail
This infographic shows how to use key elements of the retail environment — such as advertising, displays, and product choices — to create a store that promotes health at every turn.
Tobacco Retailer Licensing Playbook
Tobacco Retailer Licensing Playbook
Our playbook and its companion poster provide strategies for developing a retailer licensing program to regulate how tobacco is sold and marketed in stores.
Alcohol Collection
Addressing Alcohol-Related Harms
Excessive alcohol use can increase nuisance issues, violence, motor vehicle crashes, and health care costs. Learn about evidence-based strategies to reduce alcohol-related harms.

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