ABSTRACT
Background The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated rigorous evaluation of public health nutrition programs. The United States Department of Agriculture Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) funds nutrition incentive programs to improve fruit and vegetable purchasing and intake by incentivizing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants at the point of sale. GusNIP grantees are required to collect survey data (e.g., fruit and vegetable intake and food insecurity status) on a subset of participants. However, due to COVID-19, most GusNIP grantees faced formidable barriers to data collection. The Hunger Task Force Mobile Market (HTFMM), a Wisconsin-based 2019 GusNIP grantee, employed particularly innovative methods to successfully collect these data (n > 500 surveys). Objective To explore HTFMM's successful participant-level data collection evaluation during COVID-19. Methods A single case study methodological approach framed this study. The case is HTFMM in Milwaukee, WI, USA. Participants included HTFMM: leadership (n = 3), evaluators (n = 2), staff (n = 3), volunteers (n = 3), and customers (n = 10). These teleconference interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were coded using thematic qualitative analysis methods with two independent coders. Results Four salient themes emerged. 1) There were multiple key players with unique roles and responsibilities who contributed to personalized, proactive, and time-intensive telephone-based proctored survey collection methods;2) the importance of resources dedicated to comprehensive evaluation;3) longstanding relationships rooted in trust and community-based service are key to successful program delivery, engagement, and evaluation;4) the COVID-19 data collection protocol also serves to mitigate non-pandemic challenges to in-person survey collection. Conclusions These findings provide guidance on how alternative methods for data collection during COVID-19 can be employed and applied to other situations which may affect the ability to collect participant-level data. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature as to best practices and approaches to collecting participant-level data to evaluate public health nutrition programs. This paper details a case study of a mobile fruit and vegetable market and features key facilitators that led to successful public health nutrition program evaluation during the COVID-19 pandemic.