“Fruits and vegetables are sometimes like your kids: You love them equally, but they are different and sometimes require different approaches,” said Produce for Better Health Foundation president and CEO Wendy Reinhardt Kapsak, a registered dietitian
Fruits are often more convenient and easier to eat, but with vegetables, people feel like you have to be smart in how to prepare and eat them, Kapsak said as she discussed the downward produce consumption trends discovered in the latest “State of the Plate” report.
“They’re not as much a grab-and-go item,” she said.
The dire statistics, which show a consistent decrease in the frequency of eating produce, can be a big opportunity for the industry in changing tactics.
“There’s only about 5% of your brain geared toward deliberate habit-forming, so we’ve got to use that 5% wisely,” she said. “So, we need to make vegetables an automatic habit.”
To form a habit, it needs to be easy and pleasurable enough so you want to repeat it, and repeatable in the same context.
“Easy is not just on the consumer. It’s on us,” Kapsak said. “As an industry, we need to make vegetable consumption easy: Easy to see, easy to find, easy to pick up, easy to put in your mouth, easy to put in your kid’s mouth, easy to clean up, easy to find — not just in your retail establishment, but anywhere.”
Creating an easy, enjoyable and repeatable habit is how the industry is going to turn around that trend toward better long-term consumption.
“We need to create new fruit and vegetable behaviors, i.e., habits, to actually see those consumption numbers lift,” Kapsak said. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to see that consumption continue to erode. And we’re not going to be happy with that.”
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