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160 CHAPTER 7 ■ Choose Health in Food Vending Machines

• Fruit juices with 70% fruit content.
• Snacks with crackers and Parmigiano Reggiano (a typical Italian cheese).

To guarantee free choices to target audiences, the vending machines, where
the project was implemented, sold both traditional and healthy products.

Pricing Strategies
• The costs associated with the behavior being promoted were:
• Monetary costs, which included the economic costs for buying healthy
products.
• Nonmonetary costs, which were mainly psychological and consisted of
renouncing good-tasting foods and beverages; not feeling completely
full; feeling guilty with oneself, or feeling annoyed, or bored, while
reading health promoting advice.
• To manage costs, and counterbalance them, the following strategies were
adopted:
• The healthy products of the vending machines were priced less than
those sold in the cafés and snack bars where workers and students
often had their breaks and/or lunches.
• Stickers with the slogan, “Choose Health,” were used to signal healthy
products in vending machines; they were a nonmonetary incentive
since people were encouraged to prefer healthy products by the fact
that they could see others choosing something with a healthy label.

Place Strategies
• As specified in the section regarding the project rationale, the same
vending machines were the point of the decision-making process aimed
at nutritional choices and where the target audiences carried out their
behavior.
• To make the area convenient for the target groups, the vending machines
were located inside some schools, firms, and in two locations in the
university—in positions that were easy to reach and that the audiences
already knew as places where they could have a break.
• The refreshment areas, where the vending machines with healthy foods
and beverages were located, were made pleasant through the use of
bright graphic presentations.
• To make the locations easy to identify, the project’s vending machines stood
out with a green sticker placed on the floor with images of footprints and
the invitation to approach through the writing, “Welcome to health.”