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Hosted by Paul Evans, Registered Nutritionist (@paulthenutritionist)
Tired of the endless food fads, influencer nonsense, and TikTok nutrition “hacks”? This podcast cuts through it all.
No Forking Nonsense delivers straight-talking, science-backed nutrition advice that actually makes sense — in under 20 minutes. No fluff. No fads. Just real answers from a qualified expert who knows what works in the real world.
Each episode tackles one myth, one headline, or one common mistake — and gives you clear, practical takeaways you can apply straight away.
Whether you're trying to eat better, feel more human, or just stop falling for the same old food BS — this is the show for you.
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Hello and welcome to another episode and this one is a really exciting one because it's on the psychology of supermarkets and you're going to learn a lot. This fuses together two key interests of mine which is psychology, Nutrition and Marketing. So I hope you enjoy this episode and remember if you want to change your algorithm so it is more healthy and that you are shown on all your platforms positive factual based information whether that's on Instagram, that's different podcasts, then press follow and engage with this content because you're going to teach your algorithm that that's what you're interested in. Enjoy this episode, it's all really good. In 2016, I was going into parliament regularly regarding obesity, childhood obesity, sugar, the obesity plan and different initiatives to try and get on top of what was an absolute obesity epidemic in The United Kingdom.
@paulthenutritionist:In 2022, finally we made it illegal in this country to put chocolate bars by the tilt, unhealthy checkout. In fact, if you were to Google Paul Evans Obesity Checkout, click the news section, you will see that I was in the paper a lot following this because of the lack of engagement from UK supermarkets. That said, there was an actual law legislated pre Covid in parliament with consultations, there were even enforcement officers commissioned over where chocolate and sweets go in the supermarket. It was legislated because the supermarket layout is one of the most refined pieces of behavioural engineering in your daily life and it's almost certain that you have no idea what is happening and today I'm going to take you round the supermarket and I'm going to show you exactly what is going on. Some of this is going to really annoy you, some of this you're going to be baffled by and a decent chunk of what you've read about online is absolute nonsense, so we'll tap into that as well.
@paulthenutritionist:So the place to start, because everything else is going to make sense once you know it, is that the shelf in a supermarket is not a shelf for you to pick food up off, that's advertising space. Brands will pay supermarkets for the position and it's been standard practice for decades, listing fees, slotting fees, promotional allowances, call it what you like, when you look at a shelf and you see one brand at eye level and another down by your ankles, you are not looking at a ranking of quality, you are looking at who paid the most money. That thing at eye level isn't there because it's better, more popular, fresher, it's there because someone paid the money to be in that spot and the reason they bought it is because people like you are more likely to grab it. So here's the number, in the governments own evidence base for this legislation from 2019, putting a product in a prime location, so the entrance, the end of an aisle, the checkout increases its sales by somewhere between 2061%. So that isn't the product changing, that isn't the price changing, that's not even the packaging changing, just from the location, you can get more sales by up to 61% based on where you are in the shop.
@paulthenutritionist:The spot in the shop is the most valuable thing in our supermarkets In 2022 in England, I m pretty sure Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland weren t included in this, it got banned, stores over 2,000 sq feet, businesses with 50 or more employees, They banned, there were 13 categories of a product that failed the nutrient profile in models sugary drinks, crisps, perfectionaries, sweets, biscuits, that sort of thing. So it was agreed or legislated I should say, that they can no longer be placed at store entrances, at the end of aisles, at the check outs, same rules as the online equivalents really, and it kind of worked. However, the University of Leeds did the first independent evaluation using actual sales data from Adster Morrison, Sainsbury's and Tesco and there were 2,000,000 fewer of these products sold per day after the law came in. 2,000,000 from moving things where it was to where it had to be by legislation. However, before the law, 20 out of every 100 items sold were in scope products, whereas after the law there were 19.
@paulthenutritionist:So all of that legislation, all of the compliance, 2,000,000 items a day and it just moved by one point. Now this is my favourite part of the whole story, the Leeds team looked at what retailers actually did with the space and the answer is genius. So some genuinely put healthier products on the aisles end, which is what legislation said. Others filled the space with things that were technically exempt alcohol, baby food, products that happened to sit outside of these categories. Some replaced it with digital advertising screens and here's the clever one, the aisles got a lot longer.
@paulthenutritionist:If the end of the aisle is restricted but the middle of the aisle isn't, you extend the aisle and you add free standing display units in the middle. That's where you see those huge big cardboard towers of crisps that are technically not near the aisle end. So just a different postcode within the store. And that is the published evaluation, which tells you exactly how valuable this stuff is and how naughty the supermarkets are in trying to manipulate you. So the law took away the best positions and what they did was they found new ones within weeks.
@paulthenutritionist:Now I want
@paulthenutritionist:to talk about the layout, or shall I, let
@paulthenutritionist:me just conclude on it. So if you go into superstores now and I see it all the time, since Covid, Covid happened the reason why I was in the press about this is because I absolutely hammered stores. The only stores which consistently did, the Marks and Spencer were the worst actually and if you go to Marks and Spencer's you will likely see Peppa Pigs and all those kind of sweets buy their tills. Now they always just kind of fobbed it off, they couldn't be arsed. With Audi and Liddl are the best and they've been consistently the best throughout this whole process, but since Covid it seems that there has been a lax and I go into Supermarket now and I see chocolate and just kind of sneaky things, Morissons think it's pretty bad, but sneaky things certainly going up to the self checkout because it's a bit of a grey area.
@paulthenutritionist:So I want you to pay attention next time you go in as to the location of these suites and confecturers, but the layout itself is something I'm really interested in, I love the psychology of marketing and how we're manipulated day to day. So there's a reason why you walk into flowers and fruit first in every single supermarket, it's not a coincidence. The first thing in almost every supermarket is the fresh stuff. So flowers, sometimes bakery, fruit and there's two reasons for this. Number one, it's a transition day.
@paulthenutritionist:You've come from a car park, you're not shopping yet and nobody is expecting you to buy in the first few meters, so they use it to set the tone. Secondly, and this is the important bit, it makes the whole store feel fresh, healthy, good quality before you've gone to anything processed. If they just had ham and biscuits at the front of the store, probably going to have a different vibe. You're basically being sold a story about the shop before you buy anything. If you didn't know this already, there is a reason why milk is always as far away from the front door as possible and it's because milk is usually a destination and you have to walk through the fire to get to milk, so they put it as far away from the door as possible they often put the bread somewhere away from the milk but still at the back and usually the egg somewhere else again because every trip for a staple forces you to walk past several 100 different things that you weren't thinking about.
@paulthenutritionist:There's usually loads of colours, loads of yellows, loads of big screens, loads of advertising. Because you didn't come in for the biscuits, you came for the milk. And then you walked out with a toaster and a packet of biscuits, the biscuits were en route. Eye level is bi level, which is a standard retail phrase and exactly what that slotting fee is on about. Adult eye level for the products with the biggest margins and, notoriously, child eye level for the products aimed at children is one of the reasons the cereal aisle is such a battlefield when you shop with your four year old.
@paulthenutritionist:Here s something interesting that you may not be aware of. There is a well known study from 1982 by a gentleman called Ronald Minimum in the Journal of Marketing. He varied the tempo of background music in the supermarket and measured actual sales. Slow music and they found that people moved slower and they bought more, fast music and people moved faster and bought less. Now being fair to the evidence, later work has complicated it a little bit.
@paulthenutritionist:A 2012 study found the effect depends on whether the music is in major a minor key and a 2016 paper in the Journal of Retail and Consumer Services argued that supermarket music is mostly just a distraction and doesn t do much at all. So it s real but it s softer and a little bit messier than kind of what s online. However, if you go to a shopping mall, you will find that the music is usually very calm, very slow to get you to buy as much as possible and to take your time. The price framing. This is where they make the most of their money off you.
@paulthenutritionist:Multi buys work even when the maths doesn't. Two for three pounds feels like a deal, whether one of them costs £1.50 or not. Any number on a shelf edge, acts as an anchor, was £5 now £3 You have no idea whether it was ever five pounds but three now feels like a win. And then there's loyalty, which we've seen in this country mentally increase over their past years with club card prices, nectar prices, lidl plus. All of these things do something very specific, it creates two prices for the same item on the same shelf, which makes the higher one like a punishment for not being a member and some of them are astronomical.
@paulthenutritionist:I ve been to Tesco before and seen a regular price being £7 and a club card price being 1.50 which is a very different feeling from being offered a discount because you feel like you re winning, You feel like you ve got the one up and shut on the morons who aren t part of the club, but it also builds brand loyalty. The volume promotions were supposed to go too by the way. The same legislation was meant to restrict buy one get one free and multiply deals on those 13 categories and that part got delayed repeatedly post Covid but you know and then after Covid new government and I was part of that as well and essentially they wanted to try and get rid of all the buy one get one free as part of that legislation. So the location rules came in but the price rules didn t. In fact it got scrapped, which is a fairly good illustration of which lever the industry fought hardest to keep.
@paulthenutritionist:I won't get started on the front of packaging. Now, there is a huge amount of supermarket psychology content online and a lot of it is rubbish, so I want to unpick it for you. First, a name that you need to know. Brian Wansink. So for twenty years Wansink ran a Cornwall's food and brand lab and produced an enormous volume of headline friendly research about how environment shapes eating.
@paulthenutritionist:So bowl sizes, plate sizes, bottomless soup bowls, shelf placement, portion cookies. If you've ever read a fun fact about food psychology, it's probably a decent chance it came from him. In 2018, the JAMA retracted six of his papers in one day. So Corn had investigated and found academic misconduct including misreporting of data and problematic statistical techniques and he resigned. He has had 18 papers retracted in total, so a substantial slice of popular food environment canon rests on a lab that was found to be manufacturing its results.
@paulthenutritionist:So I not saying that environment doesn t matter, clearly it does and the sales data proves it, I m just saying that we need to be a little bit careful which specific claims we repeat. Because a lot of the famous ones come from a discredited source and they are still kind of circulating as a fact. Secondly, the trolley thing. So you will have heard that supermarkets double trolley sizes and increase spending by up to 40%. That s a marketing consultants claim, repeated everywhere without a published experiment behind it.
@paulthenutritionist:Trolleys did get bigger but the number is pretty much made up. So trolleys have grown but actually in terms of the percentage of people bought more, it had the adverse effect because people were very mindful of the amount of food that was in their trolley, so it wasn't 40%. The bread smell that I hear a lot, The story is that supermarkets pump artificial bread smell through the air conditioning. What actually happens is much more boring. In store bakeries do exist and they are often positioned near the entrance and that bakery smell will travel.
@paulthenutritionist:That s a layout decision, again trying to get you to smell the bread but it s purposely there so you can actually smell the bread. They re not putting chemicals in the vents,
@paulthenutritionist:that s a myth.
@paulthenutritionist:No clocks and no windows. That s casinos. Supermarkets usually have windows and would quite like you to leave at some stage because you spending too much time in the supermarket, property isn very good for a business. So that there is not true, mean clocks these days, no shops have clocks. So here is how I want you to shop without being played, there are seven things you can do.
@paulthenutritionist:Firstly, write a list and shop the list. It's boring, but it's the single most effective thing that you can do. A list turns shopping from browsing into fetching what you actually need. Browsing is going to cost you. Never shop hungry, you've heard this before, but it's really plausible.
@paulthenutritionist:You never want to go to the shop hungry, you need to treat it as a sensible task to complete as quickly as possible, so you go in and you are vulnerable to Germany and it's very likely you are going to be buying foods which are more appealing. Next thing, go straight to the middle aisle. So will end the advertising. The middle of the aisle is where the range actually is, things that you actually wanted, including the stuff that nobody paid to promote. Ignore the things on the gondolas, the things at the end, and go straight to the middle of the aisle.
@paulthenutritionist:Look down and look up, cheaper and own brand equivalents are usually high above or down below, because nobody paid for that. So bending down is worth real money, as is looking up. Do the unit price as well, a little bit naughty about this but you want to be looking at how much pound per kilogram or per 100 gs because that there gives you the honest number as to whether the cost of the product is actually good value. So if you use it, you can look at it for if there's like a deal on, you can work out whether the multi buy is actually worth it or not. And if it wasn't on the list, put it back before the till.
@paulthenutritionist:It's just a rule that runs automatically, if it isn't on your list, you have to it the till. Sorry, have to put it back before you get to the till. And if you still need it, you can get it next time. And the big one. If you're smart, you can shop online.
@paulthenutritionist:You can't be walked past a display that isn't in your path. Online obviously has it's own tricks, the same placement, but what you can do is you can literally Google what you need one at a time ignoring all of the offers. So what to take from this? Firstly, remember the shelf position is rented and eye level is a prime spot. Secondly, prime placement alone can shift sales by up to 61%, which is why it s worth legislating over.
@paulthenutritionist:Third, the law took 2,000,000 items a day out of peoples baskets and moved the overall figure by one percentage point, because the industry rebuilt the same prompt a few metres down the aisle, so they know what they are doing. Four. A lot of what you read about this is from a researcher with 18 retractions. So the sales data is solid, but the fun facts around the marketing in supermarkets usually isn't. Now none of this means that supermarkets are evil, they are businesses, they don't what businesses do but they are just very good at it.
@paulthenutritionist:But just know that their aim is to get you to spend as much money as possible. And when we go into Lidl and Aldi, we all kind of know that they re trying to get you to go down the middle aisle, which is why it s an online joke that you go in for a pint of milk and come out with a chainsaw. So I hope you found this helpful, I really enjoyed researching this one and hopefully it s going to save you a little bit of time and money next time you go to the supermarket. Thanks for listening,
@paulthenutritionist:I'll speak next time.