Corner stores are part of the urban food environment that may contribute to obesity and diet-related diseases, particularly for low-income and minority children. The snack foods available in corner stores may be a particularly important aspect of an urban child’s food environment. Unfortunately, there is little data on exactly what snack foods corner stores stock, or where these foods come from.

Recognizing such holes in existing knowledge about urban corner stores, Dr. Sean C. Lucan, a family physician from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, partnered with staff at The Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring everyone has access to healthy, affordable food. The research team evaluated snack foods in 17 Philadelphia corner stores, located in three ethnically distinct, low-income school neighborhoods. Team members recorded manufacturer, calories, fat, sugar, and sodium for all stocked snack items, then compared the nutritive content to established dietary recommendations and a school nutrition standard.

What the team found was a lot of unhealthy snacks – more than 450 kinds in fact! There were no fruit snacks (e.g. apples, raisins), no vegetable snacks (e.g. carrot sticks, hummus), and only 3.6 percent of all snacks (by liberal definition) were “whole grain.” The remainder (96.4 percent) were highly processed, prepackaged, calorie-dense snack products, laden with added fat and/or sugar.

While specific snacks varied considerably between neighborhoods, the distribution of snack types and nutritive content varied little by neighborhood or by store within neighborhood. Depending on serving size definition, 80.0-91.5 percent of snack foods were “unhealthy” by the school nutrition standard (including seven of 11 whole grain products). In fact, researchers found that a single snack item could supply 6-14 percent of a day’s recommended calories, fat, sugar, and sodium on average (or 56-169 percent at the extreme) for a “typical” child.

A finding of particular policy relevance from the study was that only three of the 65 identified manufacturers supplied most of the snack foods to stores in the three neighborhoods. All three manufacturers have already attempted to make healthier alternative snacks, and other snack-food manufacturers could be induced do the same - modifying their “regular” products to reduce the amounts of fat, sugar and sodium, for example, and increase the amount of whole grains or produce (e.g. dried fruit). The authors conclude that corner stores, non-profits and government can work together to encourage networks between store owners and local producers, bringing healthy food from local farms and bakeries into the corner store product mix to improve the healthfulness of corner store snack food inventories.