From theory to aisles: Cocreating nutritional serve pricing through business-academic partnerships

A/Prof Fiona Newton, 2025

In a collaboration bridging academic research and retail practice, Monash Business School led a strategic partnership with Deakin University and Ritchies Supermarkets—an Australian independent grocery chain—to address a national public health challenge: the under-consumption of vegetables and fruit.

Despite well-established nutrition guidelines recommending five 75g serves of vegetables and two 150g serves of fruit daily, only 6.5% of Australian adults meet the vegetable target, and over 55% fall short on fruit intake. One contributing factor is the way fresh produce is priced. While guidelines refer to consumption per nutritional serve, supermarkets typically price items per kilogram—bundling multiple serves together—which can make produce seem less affordable and reduce perceived value for money.

To address this, the Monash-led team developed a novel dual pricing tool—nutritional per-serve pricing—which supplements standard per-kilogram prices with the cost of a single recommended serve (e.g., $0.97 for a 75g serve of green beans). This tool helps consumers better understand the actual cost of healthy portions, aiming to enhance perceived value and promote healthier purchase decisions.

Working closely with Ritchies, the team piloted this intervention in a Victorian supermarket. Four additional stores served as control sites, selected based on similar transaction volumes, product ranges, pricing, and customer demographics. Following the introduction of per-serve pricing in the trial store, loose vegetable purchases increased by 6.2%—suggesting that clearer, serve-based pricing can positively influence shopper behaviour. No significant change was observed for fruit, likely due to its larger recommended serve size (150g).

To validate and extend these insights, the team conducted online experiments in the UK, where standard serving sizes for both fruit and vegetables are 80g. Results showed that per-serve pricing significantly increased purchase intentions for both categories (i.e., vegetables and fruit), primarily by enhancing perceived value for money.

In 2024, Ritchies scaled the intervention across its 70+ stores nationwide, supported by the Monash-Deakin team in developing staff training, in-store signage, consumer-facing materials, and a white paper outlining the evidence and rationale behind the dual pricing approach. The Australian Government’s “Eat for Health” per-serve calculator was also embedded into the Ritchies website to support decision-making.

Nutritional serve pricing may offer a rare public health win-win: a low-cost, scalable approach to boost fruit and vegetable purchases while potentially increasing retailer revenue. An embargoed national evaluation will provide further insights into its effectiveness and impact. In sum, this partnership exemplifies how academic research, when paired with business insight and operational implementation, can deliver measurable social and environmental outcomes.