What you secretly want....

Mark touched a bit on the economics of junk food in one of his posts, and this got me thinking.  Where my work is currently located is actually in somewhat of a food desert, now that I think about it!  We have a small food court in the basement of the building which has a Subway and Starbucks, along with a small convenience store.  The convenience store is packed with candy, cookies, crackers, sugar-filled beverages, and frozen meals.  On an occasion, one can find a small pre-prepared salad, Chobani yogurt, or maybe some fresh bananas, but you have to be an early-bird to get them.  The stock levels seem to be very low on the healthier items while shelves abound with high calorie, high sodium, high fat processed foods, typical of what Mark has found in the convenience stores he has visited.  Although, as I mentioned previously, Subway is available, but during lunch hours, the line is lengthy, and it’s expensive compared to what one could pay for the same ingredients in a grocery store.  Yes, you do pay more for the convenience of someone making your sandwich for you, but if the convenience store had fresh items at a reasonable price, you could make your own with less hassle and more money left over to spend on your next meal.  Starbucks is out of the question for anything but a high calorie snack, as the only food products you can buy there are pastries or prepackaged cookies, along with their usual choices of drinks. 

Mark mentioned that convenience stores stock foods that sell most, and that makes sense from an economics perspective, but I must say……disappointing from a nutrition perspective.    From my experience working in the food business, mostly in management of hospital dining facilities, vendors usually require a customer to purchase a certain quantity of food or product before they will stock it on a regular basis.  A small convenience store may not have a high enough customer demand for healthy products, prohibiting the vendor from stocking the product on a regular basis.  Hence, the reason you may see bananas in the convenience store one day, and not again for another 30 days.  Sure, you could try to switch vendors to see if you can find one that allows lower stock levels, but in a competitive market this may prove more difficult than it seems. 

So then, why DON’T customers demand MORE healthy foods?  What if a convenience store was stocked with ONLY healthy foods?  Would it quickly go out of business or would it thrive because secretly that's what customers really want?  Do people really prefer “junk” food over healthy food, or have we just trained our bodies to think this way based on our food environment?  Can we retrain our minds to think that cucumbers and carrots actually taste BETTER than chips and processed cheese dip?  Can we change our food environments in such a way that "healthy" becomes the preferred choice?