Miriam Mühl studied Nutrition and Dietetics herself. As a Healthy Environment project officer at JOGG, she mainly focuses on the topic of Nutrition in the School, Neighbourhood and Media environments. She outlines the background to the Food Environment Pilot for vo and mbo schools, which was held over the past year and a half in the affiliated municipalities of Alkmaar, Katwijk and Lelystad. “From our JOGG municipalities, we noticed that although schools, together with the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, ensure that there is a Healthy School Canteen, pupils also look for food and drinks outside the school grounds, and there are still plenty of temptations there to make unhealthy choices. That is why we first looked at what is already happening in the food environment around schools. We looked at the options and good examples available for making that food environment healthier.” JOGG had previously commissioned Locatus to map the growth of food outlets around schools between 2001 and 2019. “This showed that the growth was not in the total number of food outlets. However, there was a shift in the type of food outlets: growth was mainly seen among lunchrooms and coffee chains, while there was a decline in healthy providers such as bakeries and greengrocers.” Many schools and municipalities struggled with the issue. “They saw that a snack cart was sometimes literally parked in front of the school entrance, but they could do nothing about it.”
Three tracks
To give municipalities some guidance, JOGG developed a Food Environment Framework for SchoolsFood Environment Framework for Schools. The framework was created for the JOGG coordinator and policy officer and provides an overview of options for making the food environment in and around vo and mbo schools healthier. “The framework consists of three tracks, each with its own role: municipality (promoting a healthy food environment), school (working together to build a Healthy School) and food providers (making the food offering healthier). It also contains a number of inspirational examples.”
However, JOGG also wanted to test how this worked in practice. That is why, over the past year and a half, a food environment pilot for vo and mbo schools was carried out in three JOGG municipalities: Alkmaar, Katwijk and Lelystad. “We chose these municipalities because they had the energy and motivation to get started on this topic. In addition, they were willing to invest time in the pilot process.” In the three municipalities, the pilot worked with four school environments: one in Katwijk, one in Lelystad and two in Alkmaar. The food providers in each school environment were then identified and opportunities for collaboration were explored. Mühl admits that the greatest challenge was mainly with the food providers, but immediately offers a practical tip: “Take small steps.”
The food providers were often supermarkets. Mühl: “The supermarket managers often turned out to be intrinsically motivated to get started.” JOGG also worked with Greendish to assist the food providers in making their offerings healthier. In addition, challenges involving healthy choices were devised, allowing the food providers to make that small difference. One popular option was a combination deal. Another challenge was a stamp card to encourage healthy choices. “With these challenges, we mainly wanted to create awareness and set the process and a movement in motion.”
Longer term
This brings Mühl to the longer-term ambition. “Ultimately, we want to make the healthy choice the easy choice for pupils. It is great that we work with municipalities in this regard, because they can also exert a strong influence: through permits, for example, but also by including healthy food in their policies. The same applies to schools. With the Healthy School Canteen, you make healthy food part of schools’ policies. And with a Healthy School coordinator, a school has someone who can drive the topic forward and focus on it. This is necessary, because although a school may obtain a Healthy School certificate, the topic does not always become embedded as a result. And that is the strength of this approach: the school no longer feels that it is on its own, because it works together with food providers and the municipality to make the food environment healthier.”
Advice
Mühl does have some advice for municipalities that also want to work with schools and food providers on the topic of healthy food in the school’s living environment: “Take time to prepare and to involve the right people. Specifically for a school, this means taking the time to secure commitment from the management as well. If you invest in good preparation, you will then have a solid foundation for making the food environment healthier.” JOGG now wants to scale up the approach from the pilot to five new JOGG municipalities. “Our tip for those municipalities is: conduct a stakeholder analysis at the beginning. And make sure that you have champions within each track—municipality, school and food provider.”
Mühl also has another piece of advice for municipalities: “Start with a workshop on ‘connecting policy areas’. This allows you to identify what you can do for the food environment from the various policy areas—education, health, welfare, the economy and spatial planning—and who would like to contribute. It also creates broader support and ownership within the municipality itself.”
A third piece of advice is to opt for a tailored approach: “We noticed that there were differences in pace between the municipalities, but also between the schools. You therefore cannot use a blueprint with strict, clearly defined deadlines, because every municipality and every school is different.”
This brings Mühl to the fourth piece of advice: “Do not think hierarchically. In the pilot, we set up the three tracks hierarchically: starting with the schools, then involving the food providers and finally the municipalities. However, we have now abandoned that hierarchy and opted for a triangular relationship in which each component is equal. This also makes it possible to start with the track that has the most energy behind it.”
Dilemma
After the tips, Mühl ends with a communication dilemma: the word ‘healthy’. Mühl: “We really struggled with the question: should we use the word ‘healthy’, or will it actually put the target group off? The lesson we learned from this is to make even more use of the voices of young people and pupils. Incidentally, we resolved the dilemma this time by avoiding the word ‘healthy’ as much as possible.”
View the factsheet with the results and lessons learned here.