Healthy Stores 2020: A randomised controlled trial to assess impact of a 12-week intervention to reduce retail merchandising of discretionary food and beverages in remote Indigenous community stores, on free sugar intake using store food and drink purchasing data.

None listed

High intake of discretionary food and drinks contribute to the excessive burden of chronic disease experienced by Indigenous Australians living in remote Australia. In collaboration with the Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA; who manage 25 stores in remote Australia) we will test an intervention to reduce sales of discretionary products in remote Australian communities. Stores randomised to the intervention group will be supported by ALPA to reduce merchandising (i.e., availability and display) of four food categories (sugar, sugar sweetened beverages, sweet biscuits and confectionery) that in total provide 73% of discretionary foods and 90% of free sugars. The remaining stores (50% of total) will serve as controls. Electronic store sales data will be collected over the baseline period, 12-week intervention period and 24-week post intervention to objectively assess change in healthiness of purchases and gross store profit. This research will greatly advance our understanding of how the retail food environment can be used to improve population level dietary intake globally. We hypothesise that intervention stores will have a significant reduction in free sugars from food and drinks purchased (measured using sales data) compared with control stores over the 12 weeks of strategy compared to the baseline and this will be sustained over the 24 weeks post end of the intervention.