Are healthy grocery items more expensive than their regular within category counterparts? How do purchases of foods with positive health attributes change given negative unemployment shocks? To answer these questions, I supplement five years of multi-market, multi-chain scanner data with additional information on positive health attributes to create a unique dataset. First, this enables a robust descriptive analysis of the price of products with positive health attributes versus their regular within category counterparts; I find no evidence that products with positive health attributes are systematically more expensive or promoted systematically less.
That's from the job market paper of Jessica Rider in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley.
This is an interesting contribution to the debate between some folks at the USDA, who argue that healthy foods are not more expensive, and the work of people like Adam Drewnowski who say the opposite (here is just one example of many news stories on the debate).