Food choices at a client choice food pantry: Do low-income pantry users respond to changed opportunity costs?

Abstract

Client choice food pantries allow individuals, many of whom are food insecure, to select a preferred bundle of food. To date, interventions to improve the nutrition of food choices in pantries have not included price incentive programs like those employed in the retail food sector because pantries do not charge for food. However, economic incentives may still play a role in food pantry choices through choice architecture. We examined a natural experiment involving two client-choice regimes that effectively altered the opportunity cost of food selections. Longitudinal individual fixed effects models provide evidence that pantry clients responded to changed opportunity costs by selecting more foods that became relatively less expensive and fewer foods that became relatively more costly. Our study highlights the impact of choice architecture, and in particular relative trade-offs, on food selections in the food pantry context.