Best Start Foods: Evaluation

The document evaluates Scotland's Best Start Foods program, designed to support low-income families in purchasing nutritious food for their children. The program provides weekly payments to eligible families through a payment card, with the amount dependent on the child's age. The evaluation combined stakeholder interviews and data analysis to measure the program's success in fostering healthy eating, reducing food insecurity, and enhancing children and mothers' health and wellbeing. Findings suggest the program is well-received and positively affects shopping habits and finances, but faces challenges with awareness, uptake, and application processing. While immediate and short-term outcomes are being met, the evaluation recommends improvements in promotion, communication, and eligibility to achieve medium-term outcomes. Future evaluations will need more data to determine long-term impacts. **This summary was written by an AI model and therefore should not be considered a definitive summary of the report. If you are aware of inaccuracies, please email evaluation.registry@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.**

Description

Lead department
The Scottish Government (The Scottish Government)
Evaluation stage
A complete evaluation report
Other departments
No other departments listed
Evaluation types
Impact evaluation
Process evaluation
Impact methods
Theory-based methods
Theory-based methods
Other
Process methods
Individual interviews
Other
Surveys and polling
Grant information
This intervention is not distributing funding via a grant
Government Major Project information
This intervention is not a major project
Policies
No policies provided

Event Dates

Event Name
Publication of final results
Event date
July 2022

Evaluation Costs

Cost
Not provided

Evaluation sharing

Link(s) to published report(s)
Yes
Links to evaluation plans
No link provided
Links to published evaluations (DEBUGGING)
No final report link found.
Findings
Not provided
Permission to share confirmed
Yes