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Children and adults in Australia are not eating the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. Our objective was to assess the effectiveness of a health promotion intervention to improve fruit and vegetable intake among primary school children and their families in NSW. The Cancer Council New South Wales Healthy Lunch Boxsessions were a 25‐minute session delivered to parents of primary school‐aged children. The sessions provided information and resources about fruit and vegetables and healthy school lunch boxes. The evaluation is a quantitative uncontrolled pre‐post design. Data were collected using three questionnaires, pre‐intervention, 1 week post‐intervention and 6 months post‐intervention. A total of 204 parents completed all three evaluation questionnaires to 6 months. Knowledge of recommended intakes and serving sizes of fruit and vegetables improved significantly after the intervention. There was an increase in parents reporting packing vegetables (often/always) in the child's lunch box at 1 week (47%) and 6 months post‐intervention (40%) compared to pre‐intervention (32%). The proportion of parents reporting that they were confident in packing a healthy lunch box increased from 45% pre‐intervention to 62% after the intervention. The Healthy Lunch Boxsessions were effective in improving parental knowledge and practices related to fruit and vegetables and parental confidence with packing a healthy lunch box. This short intervention could be a useful component of a portfolio of interventions to support parents with knowledge and resources to pack a healthy lunch box for their children.

This report aims to evaluate the acceptability, appropriateness, feasibility, and adoption of a healthy lunchbox program (SWAP IT), from the parent perspective.