Open Science Open Grocery (OSOG) is a free and accessible mock online grocery store that can be modified to enhance nutritional education that is currently provided to parents during their child’s hospital stay. From the participants’ point of view, OSOG looks like any other online grocery store—it contains over 10,000 products from American grocery stores including produce, meats, frozen items and non-perishables. Each item has a price, description and nutritional information, all of which are visible to participants. On the research side, we are able to assess a user’s cart activity, interaction with nutritional labels, total shopping time and the macronutrient content of food “purchased.” In this feasibility and acceptability study, our team will modify OSOG to be used in the context of eating disorder treatment to help facilitate a rapid shift in parents’ decision making around food, which we hope will lead to rapid weight gain in their child.

We asked Parent Research Partners (PRPs) who have all had a child recover from anorexia to review OSOG with a study coordinator to share their impressions. Based on feedback from PRPs, we are adding multiple features to the OSOG app, including caloric density scale for each product, pop-ups to suggest calorically dense pairings to products, and new food additions that have been found to be helpful during renourishment.

In the pilot phase of this study, we recruited parents who currently have a child with anorexia who is hospitalized at CHOP and on the Nutritional Rehabilitation Pathway. All parents were given the modified OSOG after nutritional teaching in the hospital. We followed parents for 4 weeks and collected psychosocial and behavioral measures as well as the child’s height and weight to determine rate of weight gain.