Co-creating Weekly Shopping Lists

We are working with partners to understand what people in Scotland would choose as a healthy and enjoyable way to eat so that rights holders and decision makers will have better tools for understanding how to make this accessible for all.

In 2021, we worked with four groups of Community Advisors to develop an in-depth and shared account of weekly food practices for two different household sizes. Over months of online discussions, we worked together to co-create weekly shopping lists. This work was supported by advice from our Steering Group.

Community Advisors worked together to include a balance of foods that are:

• Healthy ‘enough’
• A good fit for people’s lives
• Enjoyable for most people

This framework helped the groups to think about what the right to food means in the context of Scotland today. The approach reflects the Scottish Government’s definition of a Good Food Nation in terms of people taking ‘pride and pleasure’ in the food they eat. The shopping lists reflect the need for food to be ‘culturally valued’ and to take account of the reality of people’s wider lives and social norms in contemporary Scotland.

The weekly meal plans and shopping lists are not meant to be representative of everyone in Scotland, but they are meant to be recognisable to most people. The shopping lists provide the basis for a ‘right to food’ metric in terms of the affordability of a healthy diet.

Measuring Availability and Price across Scotland

We are working with partners across Scotland to explore the availability and price of the Fruit and Vegetable items on the ‘Robinson Family’ weekly shopping list in different parts of Scotland.

The items on the list reflect a detailed weekly meal plan that was co-developed with a group of Community Advisors over a series of monthly meetings in 2021. These items were negotiated by the group members, and with input from public health nutritionists, over a period of months. They are what the group decided would be the best fit for this case study family’s life and are an example of a relatable, recognisable shopping list for a similar sized household in Scotland today.

Our work with Community Researchers includes:

• Online workshops
• Materials, tools and support to gather local information
• Summary reports of the key findings and next steps

Follow up workshops are an opportunity for Community Researchers to discuss what matters from what they found in terms of realising the right to food in Scotland, and they are a key part of interpreting the findings. Information from this work will be shared publicly and is intended to support local authorities in decision-making.

See our summary report of this work in summer 2022 and here for more information about the activity.