Tasty Text

Choose Homemade leverages evidence-based interventions to inspire people to cook more meals at home, promoting healthier eating habits. Grounded in extensive research, Choose Homemade examines the barriers to home cooking for SNAP-Ed-eligible populations and provides practical resources to overcome them. By applying behavioral change models, the initiative develops interventions to promote easy-to-follow recipes, meal planning tips, and budgeting advice, such as the Tasty Text intervention, with nutrition education delivered to participants via text message.

The intervention consisted of a series of 20 text messages delivered over 10 weeks (2 per week) which enrolled participants received on their mobile phones. Messages included various healthy living tips and calls-to-action with links to healthy ONIE recipes and long-form content (blogs) on the ONIE website. Four of these intervention messages were evaluative in nature via polls to assess whether or not participants were cooking featured recipes at home. 

The control group received text messages containing educational tips and calls-to-action with resources for reading their children at the same dose including four evaluative messages.