| In 2010, the federal Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act enacted strict new standards on school lunch. As a result, school lunch is healthier than ever. These new standards have already been associated with improved diet quality and weight status of school lunch participants. However, school lunch participation is declining nationally and is especially low among high school students. Research suggests that long lines during short lunch periods are a substantial barrier to school lunch participation. To improve high school lunch participation, we developed Taste Texting, a web-based, behavioral economics-informed program that allows students to pre-order school lunch from their computers or mobile phones and retrieve meals from kiosks, thereby bypassing lunch lines. This study combines mixed methods formative research and a multiple-baselines evaluation of the Taste Texting program in two high schools with identical menus in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina (n = approx 2300 students). In AIM 1, we used a series of focus groups (n= 8 groups; 60 students) and surveys (n ~440) to identify the social norms surrounding school lunch and perceived barriers to school lunch participation. In AIM 2, we use longitudinal, student-ID linked transaction data and a multinomial logistic regression model to estimate associations between student-level sociodemographic characteristics and weekly school lunch participation at baseline (n ~ 2100 students, followed for 20 weeks). In AIM 3, we evaluated the impact of Taste Texting program participation on 4, 6, and 8-week changes in school lunch participation, finding that though program adoption was minimal, the heaviest program users in one school exhibited and maintained a 12% increase in weekly school lunch participation. |
