Mobile Food Market Cluster Randomized Trial

Not Applicable

Active, not recruiting

• Conditions: Nutrition, Healthy; Healthy Diet
• Interventions: Other: No intervention; Behavioral: Full-service market intervention

• Registration Number: NCT05672186
• Lead Sponsor: University of Minnesota

Brief Summary

Mobile food markets have been proposed as a strategy for mitigating health disparities related to poor nutrition and diet/weight-related health conditions because they bring low-cost, healthy food directly to underserved populations. Full-service mobile markets may improve multiple aspects of the diet by providing foods to meet all dietary needs through a convenient one-stop shop. The full-service mobile market to be tested (Twin Cities Mobile Market) sells nutritious and staple foods from a bus that regularly visits low-income neighborhoods. Foods are sold at prices \~10% below those of grocery stores. SNAP/EBT is accepted, and a state-funded fruit/vegetable incentive program (Market Bucks) is available to shoppers. Working in partnership with our community team members, we will enroll 12 total sites and recruit 22 participants per site (N=264). We will collect baseline data and randomize sites to either receive the full-service mobile market intervention or serve as the waitlist control. We will then implement the full-service mobile market at intervention sites, follow participants for 6 months, and collect follow-up data. After follow-up data collection, waitlist control sites will receive the full-service mobile market intervention. Diet quality will be assessed through dietary recall interviews, food insecurity will be assessed by survey, and fruit and vegetable purchases will be measured by collecting one month of food purchase tracking forms at baseline and follow-up data collection. Analyses will determine whether the full-service mobile market changes diet quality, food security, and food purchasing outcomes.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study First Submitted: 2022-12-12
• Study First Submitted QC: 2022-12-20
• Study First Posted: 2023-01-05
• Study Start: 2023-01-12
• Status Verified: 2025-02
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-02-05
• Last Update Posted: 2025-02-10
• Primary Completion: 2026-04-01
• Study Completion: 2026-12-31

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 262

Inclusion Criteria

Community sites (e.g., public housing hi-rise, low-income senior living residence) must meet the following criteria:

• locale for low-income populations that experience difficulty in accessing healthy, affordable foods (e.g., public housing residences; low-income senior housing) or a community center in a low-income, low-food access (0.5 mile) census tract;
• willingness to be randomized to the intervention or waitlist control;
• located over 0.5 miles apart from other trial sites;
• willingness to allow for recruitment and data collection to occur in onsite community rooms

Participants must meet the following criteria:

• being aged 18 years or older;
• identifying as the primary food shopper in their household;
• being able to speak English or ASL;
• living within a half mile of the community site location; and
• reporting to be likely or somewhat likely to shop at the market in response to: "how likely would you be to shop regularly at the Twin Cities Mobile Market if it came to your neighborhood each week (response options: likely to unlikely).
• willing and able to participate in all study data collection activities

Exclusion Criteria

• planning to move in the next 12 months
• currently shopping at the mobile market
• not having a phone number or mailing address
• presence of a condition or abnormality that would prohibit participation in the study or the quality of the data

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Waitlist control	No intervention	Participants in low-income neighborhoods and/or adjacent to low-income housing randomized to the control group will be placed on a waitlist to receive market service after follow- up data collection is complete.
Experimental group	Full-service market intervention	Participants in low-income neighborhoods and/or adjacent to low-income housing randomized to the intervention group will receive the full-service market intervention following randomization.

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Diet quality	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Trained research staff certified in collecting dietary recalls using Nutrition Data System for Research software will collect three 24-hour dietary recall interviews (2 weekdays, 1 weekend day) from each participant at each measurement period. Dietary recall data will be used to calculate the Health Eating Index Total Score.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Food insecurity	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Food security in the past 6 months will be measured with the 18-item Household food security screening module of the USDA. From this measure, household food security status (food insecure or food secure) will be calculated per USDA guidelines for each time Food insecurity (yes, no) will be measured with the 18-item food security screening module of the USDA.
Level of food insecurity	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Food insecurity in the past 6 months will be measured with the 18-item food security screening module of the USDA. From this measure, household food security level (very low, low, marginal, and high food security) will be calculated per USDA guidelines for each time point, which will allow for calculation of level of food security prevalence at each time point.
Average weekly servings of fruits and vegetables procured	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Participants will use forms to record the fruits and vegetables they procured for their household and mail the forms to the researchers in prepaid addressed envelopes. Form data will be entered into Nutrition Data System for Research software to measure average weekly servings of fruits and vegetables procured.
Fruit and vegetables (servings/day)	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Trained research staff certified in collecting dietary recalls using Nutrition Data System for Research software will collect three 24-hour dietary recall interviews (2 weekdays, 1 weekend day) from each participant at each measurement period. Dietary recall data will be used to calculate the fruit and vegetables (servings/day) at baseline and follow-up.
Daily intake of energy (kcal/day)	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Trained research staff certified in collecting dietary recalls using Nutrition Data System for Research software will collect three 24-hour dietary recall interviews (2 weekdays, 1 weekend day) from each participant at each measurement period. Dietary recall data will be used to calculate the daily intake of energy (kcal/day).
Percent calories from added sugar	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Trained research staff certified in collecting dietary recalls using Nutrition Data System for Research software will collect three 24-hour dietary recall interviews (2 weekdays, 1 weekend day) from each participant at each measurement period. Dietary recall data will be used to calculate percent calories from added sugar.
Sodium (mg/day)	At baseline and 6 month follow-up	Trained research staff certified in collecting dietary recalls using Nutrition Data System for Research software will collect three 24-hour dietary recall interviews (2 weekdays, 1 weekend day) from each participant at each measurement period. Dietary recall data will be used to calculate sodium (mg/day) intake.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

University of Minnesota; 🇺🇸 Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States