The price category evaluates the healthfulness of products marketed through strategies that reduce the cost of products for consumers, including discounts, coupons, rewards, and time-limited deals.

Scorecard categories and components: Pricing

The placement category evaluates the healthfulness of products marketed through strategies involving where a product is located. In brick-and-mortar stores, manufacturers largely control where retailers can place products on shelves, which products are at eye level, and which products to group together through cooperative marketing agreements to influence purchasing behaviors. Similar arrangements may apply to the digital grocery store and dictate how retailers use placement strategies such as sponsored recommendations, cross-promotion (i.e., suggesting sponsored complementary products), and search result ordering online.

Scorecard categories and components: Placement

The promotion category evaluates the healthfulness of products that are marketed through marketing strategies other than pricing and placement that make products more appealing to consumers. These strategies include promoting products through title cards, banner advertisements, branded site content (e.g., branded imagery, recipes, and interactive content), user feedback (e.g., rating and reviews), links to social media pages, and retailer generated shopping lists.

Scorecard categories and components: Promotion

The usability category evaluates how easily users can navigate and interact with a retailer’s website and examines features that influence who can shop online and which products are selected. This scorecard evaluates three components of website usability. The Nutrition Facts component assesses the availability and accessibility of nutrition information for products. The customer customization component refers to the availability of website tools that make it easier for customers to find nutritious items, such as allergen and nutrition-related filters or nutrition rating systems. The information accessibility and inclusion component assesses the availability of features that increase website accessibility for all customers, including people who live with disabilities (e.g., allowing users to change text size, sufficient color contrast) or speak different languages (e.g., website content translation). It also considers the acceptance of online SNAP and WIC benefits, which make online grocery shopping more accessible for households with limited financial resources.

Scorecard categories and components: Usability

• Shift online marketing practices (product, pricing, placement, and promotion) to incentivize healthier food and beverage purchases, so that more than half of products marketed meet FDA’s “healthy” designation. Retailers should increase offerings of healthier products, use price marketing strategies on healthy items, place healthy products in prominent locations in the virtual grocery store, and promote healthy products throughout the digital shopping experience to make it easier for customers to make healthy choices.
• Support healthy purchases through customer customization. Enable customers to filter products meeting FDA’s healthy guidelines to customize their shopping experience to view only healthy foods and avoid foods high in added sugar, sodium, and saturated fat.
• Structure cooperative marketing agreements (CMAs) to promote healthier products within food and beverage manufacturer's portfolios. Retailers should work with food and beverage manufacturers to structure CMAs to promote healthier products instead of less healthy products within their product portfolios.
• Improve online food accessibility for customers using SNAP. Apply for United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) equal treatment waivers to waive delivery and service fees on SNAP purchases.⁴ This will remove barriers to online grocery shopping and improve food access for customers participating in SNAP. Additionally, improve the user experience for customers using SNAP online by clearly disclosing SNAP acceptance and labeling SNAP-eligible items. Retailers could take similar measures as online WIC rolls out.
• Make online food shopping more accessible by meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and providing website translation. Meeting web accessibility guidelines (e.g., text and background color contrast, content compatibility with assistive technologies) could make the online food shopping environment more accessible to people with disabilities. Providing website content in languages other than English can make the online food environment more accessible to non-English speaking customers.

• Require accessible Nutrition Facts panels, ingredients, and allergens for all foods and beverages sold online. Congress should pass legislation that requires accurate, legible, and easily accessible information for all foods and beverages at the online point of sale. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should issue guidance on best practices for online labeling and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should issue regulations that require retailers participating in SNAP to provide complete product information. This would help support healthier and safer food choices, especially for people with food allergies and those managing diet-related health conditions.
• Ensure that future federal labeling and marketing policies are inclusive of the online environment. Labeling requirements that support healthier choices should apply to both in-store and online environments to impact all shoppers.
• Establish retailer healthy placement standards in-store and online. Congress and state/local governments should pass legislation requiring healthy placement practices (e.g., healthy checkout bills) for all retailers to make it easier for customers to avoid marketing and impulse purchases of less nutritious items and specify how these policies should apply online. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should issue guidance on best practices for healthy placement in online food retail, and USDA should create healthy placement standards for SNAP-authorized retailers.
• Investigate how retailer marketing practices contribute to anti-competitiveness and pose a threat to consumer health. The FTC should investigate the impact of marketing practices (e.g., CMAs, category captain arrangements) on competition and act to ensure fair competition while protecting consumers from the marketing of unhealthy products.

• Pilot and evaluate healthy marketing interventions in the online retail food environment. Researchers and food retailers should collaborate to co-design, implement, and evaluate healthy marketing interventions to identify strategies that can improve healthy purchases and food and nutrition security.
• Conduct research with consumers to better understand the online shopping experience. “Shop-along” research with consumers can complement this scorecard to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the online shopping experience, including impacts of personalized and targeted marketing. Focus groups or interviews with consumers can also identify barriers and facilitators of healthy online food purchasing and examine how these factors vary across sociodemographic groups.