Nutrition: When Teens Take Over the Shopping Cart

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Now that her mother works an evening job in addition to her full-time day job, 18-year old Dionna Parker is the brains behind the family grocery shopping. Di?Onna makes more meals at home for herself than her mother does. So, when they go together once a month to shop for their three-person family, my mother asks me what we need, and I tell her, Di Onna says.

They buy most of their groceries on that monthly shopping trip. But Di Onna, who usually prepares dinner for herself, and for her mother and brother for when they get home, also makes occasional extra trips to the store when they run out of an item.

She shops strictly for price, comparing brand names with store name products. The amount of cholesterol, fat and sodium doesn't concern her, she says. But when she hears about a food safety problem, she stays away from that product. For instance, Di Onna says, she stopped buying mushrooms for a long time after her mother told her about a problem with canned mushrooms contaminated with the bacteria that causes botulism poisoning.

Jer Gallay, 16, is a teenager who eats more meals at home than does his single father. Although his father does the bulk of the shopping, Jer makes frequent runs to the grocery store. When he buys food for himself, Jer says, he looks for taste and convenience. Bagels and cream cheese and anything that can be put in the microwave are favorite items. Unlike Di?Onna, when Jer shops for the family, he looks for low-fat, low-cholesterol foods. His father has high cholesterol, and Jer reads labels to select foods good for his father's health.

Teenage Shoppers

Teenagers these days are still crowding rock clubs and filling movie theaters. But they are also frequenting supermarkets. According to a 1986 Rand Poll, 93 percent of female teenagers grocery shop for their families and frequently prepare meals.

Information from Teenage Research Unlimited supports the finding that teenagers (both boys and girls) are doing more food shopping. The Lake Forest, Ill., research firm studies teenage trends. A recent Teenage Research Unlimited survey revealed that 9 out of 10 teenagers shopped for themselves or their families in 1988, spending $47.7 billion on groceries and household products. Survey results showed that teenagers spend just under 1 1/2 hours a week shopping for the family about 1 hour for males and 1 ¾ hours for females.

Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, explains that with more single working parent families and families in which both parents work, teenagers have been forced to accept more responsibility in the home?and that includes grocery shopping. In fact, the Teenage Research Unlimited study showed that in 70 percent of homes where both (or single) parents work, teenagers do much of the grocery shopping.

Bewildering Choices

The supermarket with more than 25,000 items can be a bewildering place to shop. Nutritionists are concerned that teenagers make healthy food choices. Food manufacturers want to present products that will appeal to this new market. Both industry and health professionals are interested in what teenagers look for when they shop.

Di Onna says she looks for price. Jer looks for convenience and low-fat products. Michael Shaw, a 16-year-old from a suburban family in which both parents work, chooses favorite brand-name products that he can use to concoct weekend gourmet surprises for his family.

These teenagers come from different backgrounds, and they have varying grocery concerns. Looking at an even wider cross-section of American teenagers, the fifth annual Teen and Food Nutrition Study, conducted by Forecast magazine, reveals common choices of the teenage shopper.

Forecast magazine distributed questionnaires to 3,000 home economics students. Of the nearly 1,000 teenagers who responded, 45.2 percent said they considered price the most important factor in their food selections. Taste was a close second at 44 percent, and brand name was third at 12.4 percent. Many of the students selected more than one of the listed choices (which also included nutritional value, ease of preparation, calorie content, and packaging), so the total percentage of responses added up to 140 percent. (In some cases, students found it difficult to pick a single most important factor.)

Half the students said they sometimes use a shopping list, and another 30 percent said they always go to the grocery store armed with a list. Of these 80 percent, 45.4 percent said they were the ones in charge of making the list. An almost equal amount (46.6 percent) said someone else in the family developed the shopping list.

However, many of these teenagers claimed they make their own decisions about what brands to buy. Nearly 70 percent said they often chose a national brand they had used and liked in their home economics class. Eighty-seven percent said they had at least some influence on selection of brands for the family shopping.

Fast and easy-to-prepare food was a top item on the lists. Seventy-seven percent said they used a microwave daily, and nearly that many students said they used the microwave to cook at least part of the meal.

About the Author

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