FDA Consumer 03/06/1990 When Teens Take Over the Shopping Cart by Dale Blumenthal Now that her mother works an evening job in addition to her full-time day job, 18-year old Dionna Parker is the brains behind the family grocery shopping. Di?Onna makes more meals at home for herself than her mother does. So, when they go together once a month to shop for their three-person family, my mother asks me what we need, and I tell her, Di Onna says. They buy most of their groceries on that monthly shopping trip. But Di Onna, who usually prepares dinner for herself, and for her mother and brother for when they get home, also makes occasional extra trips to the store when they run out of an item. She shops strictly for price, comparing brand names with store name products. The amount of cholesterol, fat and sodium doesn't concern her, she says. But when she hears about a food safety problem, she stays away from that product. For instance, Di Onna says, she stopped buying mushrooms for a long time after her mother told her about a problem with canned mushrooms contaminated with the bacteria that causes botulism poisoning. Jer Gallay, 16, is a teenager who eats more meals at home than does his single father. Although his father does the bulk of the shopping, Jer makes frequent runs to the grocery store. When he buys food for himself, Jer says, he looks for taste and convenience. Bagels and cream cheese and anything that can be put in the microwave are favorite items. Unlike Di?Onna, when Jer shops for the family, he looks for low-fat, low-cholesterol foods. His father has high cholesterol, and Jer reads labels to select foods good for his father's health. Teenage Shoppers Teenagers these days are still crowding rock clubs and filling movie theaters. But they are also frequenting supermarkets. According to a 1986 Rand Poll, 93 percent of female teenagers grocery shop for their families and frequently prepare meals. Information from Teenage Research Unlimited supports the finding that teenagers (both boys and girls) are doing more food shopping. The Lake Forest, Ill., research firm studies teenage trends. A recent Teenage Research Unlimited survey revealed that 9 out of 10 teenagers shopped for themselves or their families in 1988, spending $47.7 billion on groceries and household products. Survey results showed that teenagers spend just under 1 1/2 hours a week shopping for the family about 1 hour for males and 1 3/4 hours for females. Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, explains that with more single working parent families and families in which both parents work, teenagers have been forced to accept more responsibility in the home?and that includes grocery shopping. In fact, the Teenage Research Unlimited study showed that in 70 percent of homes where both (or single) parents work, teenagers do much of the grocery shopping. Bewildering Choices The supermarket with more than 25,000 items can be a bewildering place to shop. Nutritionists are concerned that teenagers make healthy food choices. Food manufacturers want to present products that will appeal to this new market. Both industry and health professionals are interested in what teenagers look for when they shop. Di Onna says she looks for price. Jer looks for convenience and low-fat products. Michael Shaw, a 16-year-old from a suburban family in which both parents work, chooses favorite brand-name products that he can use to concoct weekend gourmet surprises for his family. These teenagers come from different backgrounds, and they have varying grocery concerns. Looking at an even wider cross-section of American teenagers, the fifth annual Teen and Food Nutrition Study, conducted by Forecast magazine, reveals common choices of the teenage shopper. Forecast magazine distributed questionnaires to 3,000 home economics students. Of the nearly 1,000 teenagers who responded, 45.2 percent said they considered price the most important factor in their food selections. Taste was a close second at 44 percent, and brand name was third at 12.4 percent. Many of the students selected more than one of the listed choices (which also included nutritional value, ease of preparation, calorie content, and packaging), so the total percentage of responses added up to 140 percent. (In some cases, students found it difficult to pick a single most important factor.) Half the students said they sometimes use a shopping list, and another 30 percent said they always go to the grocery store armed with a list. Of these 80 percent, 45.4 percent said they were the ones in charge of making the list. An almost equal amount (46.6 percent) said someone else in the family developed the shopping list. However, many of these teenagers claimed they make their own decisions about what brands to buy. Nearly 70 percent said they often chose a national brand they had used and liked in their home economics class. Eighty-seven percent said they had at least some influence on selection of brands for the family shopping. Fast and easy-to-prepare food was a top item on the lists. Seventy-seven percent said they used a microwave daily, and nearly that many students said they used the microwave to cook at least part of the meal. Reading the Labels Among the array of different brands, colorful packages, and signs pointing to frozen foods that are fun and easy to make is another consideration begging for teenagers attention: good nutrition. Giant Foods, a supermarket chain in the Washington, D.C., area, now distributes bright orange and green leaflets addressing nutrition concerns for teenagers. The Choice Is Yours When Eating on the Run, reads one flyerwhich lists a number of healthy food choices. For instance, it recommends selecting cheese pizza over nachos because both have calcium but nachos can have twice the fat and sodium. According to a recent Gallup Poll, teenagers talk a healthy diet, but act differently. For example, the poll of 375 teenagers found that teens said they selected a diet they thought was good for them. But, potato or corn chips, cookies, candies, ice cream, and other sweets led the list of preferred snack foods. Only 10 percent named fruit as their favorite snack food. The Teen and Food Nutrition Study provided more evidence that teenagers do not, in fact, select healthy snacks. Potato chips were the favorite with almost three-fourths of respondents, ice cream was second, and candy third. Half the teenage shoppers said they never read labels. Of those who do, calorie content was by far the most sought information. Special Cases The link between diet and health does seem to impress teenagers when nutrition affects their special needs. Now that Michael Shaw plays basketball in the winter and is on the golf team in the spring, he says he has been making healthier between-meal snack selections. When his 18-year-old sister Leslie was a star high school gymnast, she strictly followed a high-carbohydrate diet recommended by her coach. Dieting to lose weight is by far the most common concern of teenagers. Forty-three percent of the teenagers in the Teen and Food Nutrition Study said they had tried to lose weight in the last year. More than half (55 percent) of these teenagers attempted to lose weight by cutting out desserts and sweets. Increasing physical activity was second and skipping meals third. It's well accepted that anorexia and bulemia are problems that often begin in adolescence. (See The Gender Gap at the Dinner Table, in the June 1984 FDA Consumer.) A Giant Foods leaflet recognizes the prevalence of dieting and the potential for teenagers to develop eating disorders and suggests low-calorie but nutritious meals that teenagers can pick up at the grocery store: salad bar selections, self-serve frozen yogurt, and soup or chili from the soup bar. Chili, for example, says the Giant flyer, provides iron from beef and beans, and coleslaw provides vitamin C and is low in calories. In its information directed to teenagers, Giant says, What may surprise the dieter is that the body actually responds to crash dieting as it would to starvation. The body lowers its metabolic rate, the pamphlet explains, thus burning fewer calories. Findings from a recent, small study conducted by the National Dairy Council suggest that nutrition education in schools may encourage teenagers to improve their eating habits. However, as Teenage Research Unlimited's Peter Zollo acknowledges, the effect of large-scale nutrition education campaigns on teenagers has yet to be explored by market researchers. Teenagers like Jer and Di Onna seem to be most influenced by information they pick up from their families. Nutrition can become a family concern. Ellyn Satter, a family therapist and dietitian with the Family Therapy Center in Madison, Wis., points out that parents plan the menus for their young children and set an eating style for the family. Driver's License and Grocery Cart Teenagers most likely to be checking out the supermarket are from upper and lower income families in cities and lower income families in small towns, found Teenage Research Unlimited. That's where the greatest percentage of working mothers are. Traditional male/female roles also are changing. Although 94 percent of teenage females surveyed were shoppers, 90 percent of the males were also doing the food shopping. Of 35 percent of teens shopping one or more times a week, reports a recent issue of Food Processing magazine, the boys are shopping 8 percent more than the girls. Most of these teenagers are 16 or older (the age when, in most states, teenagers can obtain their driver's license). Perhaps the trend of the future will be for 16-year-olds first to obtain their driver's license, next the family car, and then a grocery shopping cart. Dale Blumenthal is a staff writer for FDA Consumer.