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Retailers Support Family Meals

PLEASANTON, Calif. Connect Together is a new year-round message Safeway is delivering in-store and online to stress the importance of family meals. The campaign kicked off last Monday in honor of Family Day, an annual event that encourages parents and their children to eat dinner together. Safeway is using print, broadcast and online tools to urge parents to connect with their children over meals.

PLEASANTON, Calif. — “Connect Together” is a new year-round message Safeway is delivering in-store and online to stress the importance of family meals.

The campaign kicked off last Monday in honor of Family Day, an annual event that encourages parents and their children to eat dinner together. Safeway is using print, broadcast and online tools to urge parents to connect with their children over meals.

“Spending family time together over meals and other activities has a direct, positive impact on the lives of children and teens,” said Larree Renda, Safeway's executive vice president and chair of the Safeway Foundation.

The Safeway Foundation celebrated Family Day by hosting events in California with First Lady Maria Shriver. In Chicago, Safeway's Dominick's Finer Foods division had a community dinner with local and state government officials.

“Sharing dinner together as a family is more than just sharing a meal,” Safeway promotional materials read. “It's sharing your lives.”

Safeway played a vital role in this year's Family Day, because The Safeway Foundation funded research from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University showing that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.

CASA has been tracking the relationship between teen substance abuse and family dinners for the last 12 years. This year marked the first time that a food retailer funded its annual study.

Among this year's just-released findings: Compared to teens who have frequent family dinners (five or more per week), those who have infrequent family dinners (two or less) are:

  • Three and a half times more likely to have abused prescription drugs or used an illegal drug other than marijuana.

  • Three times more likely to have used marijuana.

  • Two and a half times more likely to have used tobacco or marijuana.

  • One and a half times more likely to have tried alcohol.

“Parental engagement is very protective for kids,” said CASA's director of special projects, Elizabeth Planet. “It's a way to be involved in kids' lives and keep them out of trouble.”

Also noteworthy is the fact that 84% of teens said they would rather eat with the family than dine alone.

“Kids may say they don't want to eat dinner with their parents, but they don't mean it,” said Planet.


Family meals are especially important when it comes to younger teens. For instance, 12- and 13-year-olds who have infrequent family dinners are six times likelier to have used marijuana than those who eat family meals frequently.

“It seems that dinners are having a particularly big impact on the youngest kids,” Planet said.

Family Day, which CASA created in 2001, is celebrated each year on the fourth Monday of September. This year's retail and manufacturer sponsors included Kroger, ShopRite, General Mills, Smucker's and Del Monte.

“Family Table … A Child's Best Classroom” is the slogan Kroger Co. is using to motivate its customers and employees to have meals with their families more often. Cincinnati-based Kroger conveyed the message via in-store signage, outdoor billboards, radio spots and newspaper advertising.

It also distributed suggestions to help families make the most of family meals. They include:

  • Encouraging children to create menu ideas and participate in meal preparation.

  • Talking about what happened in everyone's day.

“Family meals are an ideal time to talk with your children and listen to what's on their mind,” David Dillon, Kroger's chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We support Family Day because building strong, healthy families is at the core of our business.”

Family Day is key for Center Store, as several retailers promoted packaged groceries for quick and easy meals. ShopRite, part of the Elizabeth, N.J.-based Wakefern Food Group, encouraged people to keep their kitchen stocked with whole-grain pastas; brown rice; canned beans, tuna and vegetables; and frozen vegetables.

Other retailers also got involved. Ukrop's, Richmond, Va., for instance, celebrated the day by offering discounts on Lipton Sides and other packaged goods.

Meanwhile, additional findings from the CASA study include the following statistics:

  • Teens who have dinner with their families five or more times a week are more likely to say that they receive mostly A's and B's in school compared with teens who have dinner with their families fewer than three times a week (64% vs. 49%).

  • Teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week are more than twice as likely to do poorly in school.

  • Fifty-nine percent of teens report having dinner with their families at least five times a week, the same proportion CASA has observed over the past several years.

  • Eighty-one percent of 16- and 17-year-olds prefer to dine with their families.

  • Of those teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week, 62% said they would prefer to eat with their families.

  • Half of the teens surveyed (59%) are eating dinner at home by themselves or with someone else when they are not eating dinner with their parents.

  • Eighty percent of parents said they do not worry where their teen is and what he or she is doing on those evenings when their teen does not eat with them.

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