Transforming Retail Food Environments to be Health-Enabling
Food retail stores, including grocery stores and supermarkets, are prime settings to improve population diet and health through implementation of health enabling environments. How foods are marketed and made available influences consumer food choices. Learn to influence food retail practice and food policy for population health improvement with this professional development course designed specifically to help facilitate healthy changes in food retail.
Enrolment is now open for the 2025 healthy food retail short course that will again be run in collaboration between RE-FRESH and Monash University, for the fifth consecutive year.
This innovative short course will be delivered by world experts in the field from 31 July 2025 – 25 September 2025.
Course participants will be provided with nine weeks of online professional development, featuring weekly Zoom workshops with the researchers who have paved the way in this emerging field.
No other course of this type exists – addressing a knowledge gap for a workforce engaged in the complex systems change needed to improve the health of food retail environments for population health benefit.
It will teach the power of marketing and retail merchandising, evidence-based tools needed to enact change and provide the skills and knowledge to influence consumer decision-making and intervene to facilitate better retail practices for public health.
The learning package includes pre-reading, quizzes, videos and the weekly interactive two-hour Zoom workshops with the world leaders in this field. Theory and practice are combined, with a focus on case studies for real-world application.
Course details
- Dates: 31 July 2025 – 25 September 2025
- Duration: 9 weeks
- Delivery: Online
- Cost: $1300
- Enrolment end date: Friday 25 July 2025
Who is this course for?
The course is aimed at who can directly influence food retail environments for health, such as public health practitioners/health promotion professionals, local government officers, dietitians, nutritionists, public health policy makers and those with influence on public health policy. Students studying public health/nutrition at a Masters level would also benefit.
Learning outcomes
On completion of the course, participants will be able to:
- Evaluate the role of retail food settings in population diet
- Critique the key theories used in food retail marketing practice and their influence on consumer food choices
- Distinguish the relationships between food retailers, suppliers and manufacturers in the array of retail food settings
- Explore Australian and international regulations, laws and social responsibility agendas that influence food retail marketing practice
- Critique the evidence used to inform practice and policy intervention
- Design a monitoring and evaluation framework from a food retail setting, to inform best practice in relation to health
- Plan an approach to modify a selected food retail setting to be health enabling