Social marketing including financial incentive programs at worksite cafeterias for preventing obesity: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: As with food-taxation strategies, such interventions as discounted healthy menus, point-of-purchase advertisements, and sugar-free beverages for employees at worksites could help prevent obesity. This study assessed the effectiveness of food environment interventions incorporating financial incentive or social marketing strategies at workplace cafeterias, vending machines, and kiosks toward preventing obesity and improving dietary habits. METHODS: We conducted searches on CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases. The study designs included were randomized control trials (RCTs) and cluster RCTs. We evaluated the effectiveness of financial incentive or social marketing strategies interventions (such as discounts) on health outcomes or food intake behavior. Two reviewers independently screened the studies for inclusion. We assessed the risk of bias using the Cochrane Collaboration’s tool. This protocol was published in 2014. RESULTS: We included three trials, with a combined total of 3013 participants. There were limited available data from RCTs on changes in body weight. No eligible social marketing studies were retrieved. In some cases, a meta-analysis could not be conducted owing to differences in the analytic methods for the outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Lack of evidence made it difficult to draw any conclusions. In future surveys, it will be necessary to conduct interventions focusing only on financial incentive intervention versus no intervention in order to determine whether the incentive strategy has a clear impact. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD4201401056 ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13643-019-0965-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.