Nuestro Valor: Increasing healthier food access for rural Latino communities through a food retail intervention

Diets low in fruits and vegetables are associated with chronic disease disparities for Latinos living in rural areas. Furthermore, in rural areas, structural and social factors like low wages, limited public transportation, and inability to access social services, can limit access to healthy food for Latinos. Despite these barriers to healthy foods, many Latinos regularly shop at retail food stores, which provide access to desired foods and services. Our Value is an effective, culturally tailored retail food store intervention to promote the consumption of fruits and vegetables among shoppers. This theory-informed, multi-level intervention addresses customer behavior, social, and structural factors at the store. We propose to shift our knowledge on adapting evidence-based interventions such as Our Value to rural areas. We are partnering with community leaders and members to tailor this intervention in rural communities, retail food stores, and the structural and social factors that impact these communities. Using a hybrid type I cluster-RCT design, we aim to augment and adapt the intervention for populations living and shopping in stores in rural communities; to assess the implementation of the adapted intervention on access to fruits and vegetables at the store level; and to evaluate the effectiveness of the adapted intervention on customers’ consumption of fruits and vegetables. We engage in a community-based participatory research process to create new knowledge on translating evidence-based interventions for rural communities and advance our understanding of addressing social and structural drivers of health while maximizing effectiveness and external validity. This research aims to accelerate the implementation of evidence-based interventions to promote health and reduce health disparities in the United States.