URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2018_Melissa-McCarthy

Project: Big Data of the Nutrition Field

Researchers: • Maya Vadiveloo, assistant professor, nutrition and food sciences • Stephen Atlas, assistant professor, marketing • Ashley Buchanan, assistant professor, pharmacy practice • Xingtong Guan, graduate student, marketing About: Though her data sets may not be huge in comparison, Maya Vadiveloo’s research is considered the big data of the nutrition field. With the help of several colleagues, she is examining purchasing habits of shoppers at grocery stores and encouraging healthier purchasing with targeted coupon codes. “Consumer psychology and customer analytics are used by marketers to target coupons and other messages to consumers to purchase various products,” Vadiveloo says. “We plan to use a similar analysis to develop a set of targeted coupons that incentivize healthier food purchases for different groups of consumers, with the goal of using this type of tailored nutrition intervention to gradually improve the quality of consumers’ overall diet.” Purchase data is already automatically collected by the point of sales system at checkout, and Vadiveloo hopes to develop algorithms to analyze this data. She will then be able to offer, for example, customers who buy high sugar yogurt coupons for lower sugar options.

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“We plan to use a similar analysis to develop a set of targeted coupons that incentivize healthier food purchases for different groups of consumers.

Spring | 2018 Page 31