Corporate Social Responsibility Statements in Top Selling Restaurant Chains Between 2012-2018

Background Food companies have changed how they talk about their role in the obesity epidemic—shifting from a narrative of personal responsibility to wanting to be “part of the solution”. Understanding restaurants’ commitments to health and other social issues can inform the ways restaurants can impact population health. Objective To understand the prevalence and content of corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements in the top selling chain restaurants between 2012 and 2018. Study Design, Settings, Participants We used a web scraping technique to abstract relevant text information (n= 6,369 text sections that contained possible CSR statements, or thematically coded portions of the text section) from the archived web pages of the 96 top selling chain restaurants. All data were abstracted, and analyses were completed between November 2019 and November 2023. Measurable Outcome/Analysis Content analysis was used to identify key themes in CSR statements across restaurants and over time. Results The majority of restaurants (68.8%) included a CSR statement on their web pages between 2012-2018, and almost half of the restaurants included a health-related CSR (49.0%). There were increases in CSR statements by chain restaurants over the study period from 186 CSR statements in 2012 to 1,218 CSR statements in 2018, with most statements focused on philanthropy (37.1% of coded CSR statements), community activities that were not health-related (18.4% of coded CSR statements), and sustainability initiatives (18.3% of coded CSR statements). Only one quarter (24.4%) of these statements were health-related and many were vague in nature (only 52% of the eligible statements could be coded by theme). Conclusions There is a need for more actionable health-focused initiatives in the CSR statements for chain restaurants. Public health initiatives that engage with the restaurant industry should work to promote CSR statements that are in line with other collective positions around improving health and reducing diet-related disease. Funding American Heart Association