Park City grocery store hosts campaign to curb youth drinking

Bright floor decals now wind through The Market in Park City, turning a routine grocery trip into a reminder that Summit County’s youth alcohol problem is still larger than the state’s. The new Prevention Trail campaign uses the message “Every Step Counts” to push families into conversations about drinking before children reach age 21.

The Market, at 1500 Snow Creek Drive, hosted the public rollout at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 23, with more installations planned at businesses and community hubs across Summit County over the next month. The project brings together local leaders and Parents Empowered, Utah’s statewide underage drinking prevention campaign, which is overseen by the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Services and funded by the Utah Legislature.

The strategy is built around visibility and repetition. Organizers are placing the decals in store aisles so parents and children encounter facts and prompts while shopping together. Prevention officials say grocery stores make sense because families already move through them side by side, turning an ordinary errand into a chance to talk about the risks alcohol poses to developing brains.

Whether that model can actually curb illegal sales and underage access depends on what happens after the shopping trip ends. The campaign is not a compliance sweep at the register. Instead, it is designed to reduce demand by encouraging parents to set clear expectations, communicate strong disapproval and stay actively involved, all of which research links to lower drinking risk among children.

The campaign lands in a county where the numbers remain troubling. Summit County Health says youth alcohol use fell from 25.5% in 2023 to 20.6% in 2025, but a 2025 SHARP survey still found that 20% of local students reported drinking alcohol at some point, compared with a statewide average of 10.9%. TownLift also reported that Summit County’s 30-day alcohol use rate reached 10.7%, the highest among Utah’s local substance abuse authority regions, versus 3.8% statewide.

The SHARP survey reaches students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12, giving local officials a repeated look at whether prevention efforts are moving the numbers. For Summit County, that makes the grocery-store approach more than a community gesture. It is a test of whether reaching parents where they already shop can help shift behavior before a first drink becomes a pattern.