This article discusses how qualitative vignettes were combined with interviews to explore a complex public health issue; that is, promoting unhealthy foods and beverages to children and adolescents. It outlines how the technique was applied in practice and the combination of vignette-based interviews with a broader approach involving Gadamerian hermeneutics. Twenty-one participants from the public health community and the marketing and food and beverage industries took part in vignette-based interviews between March and September 2012. Overall, the qualitative vignette method afforded an efficient, generally well-received technique that effectively explored the issue of promoting unhealthy foods and beverages to children and adolescents. The vignette provided structure to interviews but allowed certain responses to be investigated in greater depth. Through this research, we argue that qualitative vignettes allow researchers to explore complex public health issues. This article also provides a valuable resource for researchers seeking to explore this technique.

Objective: Transnational food, beverage and restaurant companies, and their corporate foundations, may be potential collaborators to help address complex public health nutrition challenges. While UN system guidelines are available for private-sector engagement, non-governmental organizations (NGO) have limited guidelines to navigate diverse opportunities and challenges presented by partnering with these companies through public–private partnerships (PPP) to address the global double burden of malnutrition.Design: We conducted a search of electronic databases, UN system websites and grey literature to identify resources about partnerships used to address the global double burden of malnutrition. A narrative summary provides a synthesis of the interdisciplinary literature identified.Results: We describe partnership opportunities, benefits and challenges; and tools and approaches to help NGO engage with the private sector to address global public health nutrition challenges. PPP benefits include: raising the visibility of nutrition and health on policy agendas; mobilizing funds and advocating for research; strengthening food-system processes and delivery systems; facilitating technology transfer; and expanding access to medications, vaccines, healthy food and beverage products, and nutrition assistance during humanitarian crises. PPP challenges include: balancing private commercial interests with public health interests; managing conflicts of interest; ensuring that co-branded activities support healthy products and healthy eating environments; complying with ethical codes of conduct; assessing partnership compatibility; and evaluating partnership outcomes.Conclusions: NGO should adopt a systematic and transparent approach using available tools and processes to maximize benefits and minimize risks of partnering with transnational food, beverage and restaurant companies to effectively target the global double burden of malnutrition.

Food waste is a significant environmental, economic, and social issue. In many cases, packaging protects food and prolongs its shelf life, reducing the overall environmental impact by reducing food waste. This research focuses on consumer perceptions of the role of packaging and on-pack labelling in reducing household food waste. The following research questions provided the framework for the study: (1) could packaging play a role in decreasing food waste; (2) what are labelling and packaging designs’ impacts on consumer decision-making about food waste? This research draws on two qualitative studies. Study One focuses on journey mapping—following food waste throughout the consumer’s engagement with food ‘journey’ from planning to disposal. Study Two comprises a series of in-depth interviews in consumers’ homes focusing on how consumers engage with food packaging and food waste. Results indicate that there are at least two streams of consumer perceptions to consider when determining the relationship between food packaging and reducing food waste: the first is how practically useful packaging is for consumer needs; the second is consumers’ perceptions about food packaging itself. There are tensions and trade-offs between these two sets of considerations. The results of the studies show consumers are unlikely to consider food packaging or reducing food waste as a primary motivation in their food purchasing decisions. The studies also show reducing packaging, including plastic packaging, is seen as more important than reducing food waste. Our results also highlight important elements to consider when designing food packaging. These results suggest that a fundamental review is needed for many aspects of packaging and storage information and that this review should account for consumers’ information needs at different points: purchase, storage, during consumption, and between instances of consumption. Furthermore, our results suggest packaging designs that provide clear information and instructions for consumers to reduce food waste are needed.

Consumers are vital stakeholders in creating and reducing food waste. However, limited research into consumers’ perceptions of food waste and food packaging is available to inform research, packaging design or policy so that sustainable consumption practices among consumers might be better encouraged and enabled. By applying multivariate linear modelling to a sample of 965 Australian consumers, this study investigated consumers’ perceptions of packaging and packaging’s relationship to food waste. Overall, consumers perceived packaging waste as a more serious environmental issue than food waste. Most consumers did not consider food waste as an extreme environmental issue. Consumers’ perceptions of the seriousness of food waste also influenced their perceptions of packaging designed to reduce food waste. Significant differences between men and women and older and younger consumers were found regarding the relationship between packaging and food waste as well as food waste as an environmental issue. This study provides a detailed understanding of consumers and packaging, and it alerts designers and decision-makers to the differing attitudes towards food and packaging waste as well as the likelihood of consumers taking up more sustainable consumption practices.

Public health advocates have repeatedly highlighted parallels between food marketing and childhood obesity. Yet existing literature has not explored the connection between the promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages, certain characteristics of integrated marketing communication (IMC) and the power of multinational food and beverage companies. This is problematic because IMC represents the dominant marketing paradigm in use today. This article draws on critical theory and literature from across public health, marketing, business and related fields. By focusing on macro-level antecedents and interactions, this discussion highlights a previously unarticulated dimension of the promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages to children and adolescents. In doing so, this discussion aims to generate greater recognition of the broader environmental circumstances and processes that surround food marketing tactics and their consequences for public health nutrition. This perspective will also contribute to an expanded understanding of unhealthy food marketing and its unintended consequences, among an audience of nutrition, public health and policy communities.