Soda Sales Dropped 40% After Berkeley’s Checkout Ban. Candy Wouldn’t Budge.
Soda sales in Berkeley stores fell by nearly 40% after the city’s checkout ban became legally enforceable, according to new sales data. Candy told a different story. Overall candy sales rose right after the rule took effect, then leveled off once enforcement began, even though the same law barred candy from checkout displays right alongside soda.
Berkeley made history in 2021 by becoming the first place in the world to require large stores to keep sugary sodas and candy away from checkout lanes, the spot where a tired shopper with a restless child in tow used to face a wall of candy bars and cold drinks at eye level. A new study published in The Lancet Public Health tracked years of point-of-sale records from stores in Berkeley and nearby cities to see what happened after the ban took hold. The soda category tracked in the study included both sugar-sweetened drinks and those made with non-sugar sweeteners.
That distinction matters, because other places have already copied Berkeley’s approach, including the city of Perris, California, and unincorporated Contra Costa County. England and Wales already restrict less healthy checkout items more broadly, and similar rules take effect in Scotland this October. If a strict law like Berkeley’s could not move overall candy purchases, that carries a lesson for other governments hoping a checkout rule alone will meaningfully cut sugar purchases.
Researchers Compared Berkeley Sales Against Three Other Cities
Instead of surveying shoppers about their intentions, researchers went straight to actual point-of-sale records from Circana, a company that collects real sales data from retailers. They pulled records from 71 stores across four California cities, covering March 2019 through the end of 2023. Only 11 of those stores were in Berkeley itself, three supermarkets, six drugstores, and two mass merchandisers, while the other 60 stores in Davis, Oakland, and Sacramento served as a comparison group. Researchers only included chains that also operated in Berkeley, a choice meant to keep the comparison as apples-to-apples as possible. All told, the analysis covered more than 9 million monthly product records for soda and over 52 million for candy.
To estimate whether the law itself was linked to any changes, rather than sales rising or falling for unrelated reasons, the team compared sales trends in Berkeley against the comparison cities over the same stretch of time. If Berkeley’s numbers moved differently right around when the law kicked in, researchers treated that gap as evidence connected to the policy, a method that shows association, not conclusive proof of cause and effect.
Source : https://studyfinds.com/banned-candy-and-soda-checkout-lines
