EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does increasing the availability of a nutritious food produced by a small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise increase its consumption? Evidence from a field experiment in Kenya

Mywish K. Maredia, Maria Porter, Eduardo Nakasone (), David Ortega and Vincenzina Caputo

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 2024, vol. 46, issue 2, 414-434

Abstract: Many development programs rely on the idea that increasing profitability of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) could increase availability of nutritious foods among low‐income consumers. We designed a randomized controlled trial in which we made a specific nutritious product produced by an SME exhaustively available in low‐income local markets. We find that compared to control markets, consumers in treated markets purchased and consumed more of this product and less of competing brands with added sugar and fat. However, overall consumption for the product category was not increased and there was no change in the consumption of other related but potentially less nutritious foods. Our findings suggest the need for alternative policies to increase consumption of nutritious foods.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13402

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:apecpp:v:46:y:2024:i:2:p:414-434

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:wly:apecpp:v:46:y:2024:i:2:p:414-434