Sodium Intake and Reformulation in the U.S : Evidence from Scanner Data

We barcode-level information on the near-universe of packaged foods around the time when certain U.S. food manufacturers committed to the 2009 National Sodium Reduction Initiative, a voluntary pledge to reduce sodium content in food products by 2014. We pursue two objectives. First, we isolate and quantify the role that reformulation, vis-à-vis consumer purchasing behavior, has played in recently documented declines in sodium intake in the U.S. Second, we evaluate whether the NSRI played a causal role in reformulation efforts to reduce sodium content. We find that reformulation efforts alone would have contributed to a 53% reduction in sodium intake between 2007 and 2015; however, changes in consumer shopping behavior negated almost the entire improvement. The evidence shows that the NSRI caused the average sodium content across UPCs to decrease by 6.23%. We also document and discuss nutritional inequality (as it pertains to sodium intake) across socioeconomic and demographic groups