Wellness

Walmart has launched an online and in-app experience based on a platform from nutrition technology company Sifter that includes a "Shop-by-Diet" scanning tool allowing customers to determine if products meet certain health preferences like diets, allergens, interactions with medications and medical conditions, Sifter announced in early January. The new tool builds on Walmart's efforts to make it easier for shoppers to identify products that meet their health and wellness criteria as retailers look to tap into the food-as-medicine trend. 

After scanning a product's barcode, shoppers select health filters and the tool will let the shopper know if the product fits all, some or none of the chosen attributes. Shoppers can also examine the nutrition panel on the product page to see if it meets their needs and set up a "diet profile" that saves wellness goals, allergens, ingredients to avoid, health and lifestyle diets, and medications.

The MyDiet Profile lets shoppers select from more than 100 health attributes under areas like lifestyle and health diets, allergens and medications, and allows them to build a list of ingredients they want to avoid. Customers who set up a "MyDiet Profile" can paste a recipe link into a tool that determines how the recipe fits into the saved health preferences. When using the scanning tool, shoppers can toggle the filters on and off.

Other features include buildable shopping lists, a "Health Hub" with wellness content and explanations of different diets. Shoppers can select a specific Walmart store to browse and buy items, which have product pages with nutrition information, health attributes and preparation instructions.

Sifter was created by Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, founders of Peapod and ItemMaster, a product content platform for brands, retailers and consumers. The company claims its proprietary technology is "science-based" and uses input from registered dietitians, health and wellness organizations, major retailers, brands and data providers. 

Sifter noted in the announcement that 200 million consumers are following a diet or health-related program and 85 million have allergies or food intolerances. NielsenIQ said last summer that more than 70% of shoppers look for specific product attributes when picking out brands and gave "heart-healthy" as an example of an important attribute among a majority of surveyed consumers. 

Last year, Walmart added an online shopping destination called Built for Better to help customers find products aligned with their healthy food, clean living or sustainability goals. Digital icons identify products that meet independent standards like EWG Verified, Energy Star Certified or Rainforest Alliance Certified and are split under two labels: "For You” for nutrition and products made without specific materials or ingredients and "For the Planet” for products made in a way to reduce environmental impacts.

Competitors have also taken steps to make health-related products easier to find. Last summer, Amazon added certifications from health, organic and animal welfare organizations under its sustainable labeling program, while Target has added in-store and online "wellness icons," including identifiers like organic, "simple ingredients," "nutritious" and vegan.

Both Amazon and Walmart have linked labeling of health-related products to their sustainability efforts. 

Half of food retailers significantly or moderately increased their health and well-being programs and prioritized offering better-for-you products during the pandemic, according to a report released in September by the Food Industry Association (FMI) and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation (Academy Foundation). 

There are five key ways retailers can promote food-as-medicine efforts, according to the report: prescription programs, personalized nutrition education, medically tailored nutrition, path-to-purchase marketing and incentive programs. 

Even if they don't use the label "food as medicine," which the Academy Foundation defines as “a philosophy where food and nutrition aids individuals through interventions that support health and wellness,” food retailers are already connecting food and nutrition to health and wellness, per the report.

The pandemic has placed a greater emphasis on health and wellbeing, with shoppers and employees turning to food as an outlet to fortify their health.

Food as medicine is already integrated into other industries, such as healthcare, and can be leveraged by food retailers to their advantage, the report notes. When grounded in science, food as medicine can better connect retailers with shoppers and workers by showing them how food impacts their health. 

While the concept is usually driven by middle-class and educated shoppers between the ages of 25 and 44, food retailers shouldn't ignore other customer demographics.

"It is important to note that the individuals driving this culture aren’t necessarily the people most affected by it. Although the middle class is driving this culture, changes within it impact the lower and upper classes as well," the report said.  

Food retailers have five main programs they can explore to promote food as medicine, per the report:

• Incentive programs: Food retailers could have discounted pricing on categories like fruits and vegetables, digital coupons for loyalty members to get them to try new products or employee discounts. While this type of program aims to minimize economic barriers to wholesome, nutrient-rich foods, not all participants will necessarily be food insecure, the report noted. 
• Path-to-purchase marketing: This strategy could include signage, labels, information on grocers' apps and websites, virtual food demonstrations and online search options with the goal of having people make behavioral or environmental changes when shopping. "Behavior change includes increased awareness and knowledge, and environmental change includes improved availability and/or affordability of nutrient-rich foods," the report said. 
• Medically tailored nutrition: Medically tailored food or meal programs allow a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) or health professional to write a prescription for tailored meals or boxes of food to meet people's specific health conditions. The report notes this type of program can "provide a more comprehensive therapy for patients."
• Personalized nutrition education: Retailers could publish nutrition-focused blogs, offer a diabetes prevention program or establish employee wellness programs. Health screenings could include checking blood pressure, blood glucose levels and weight and biometric screenings. 
• Food prescription programs: A health professional or RDN could prescribe food to patients who have health conditions or face food insecurity by giving them coupons or vouchers. 

RDNs are in the best position to advance these efforts if food retailers' executive leaders and chief merchants fully embrace the concept, the report found. They can drive adoption with efforts like helping improve food access and nutrition security; promoting food safety education; and driving brand awareness through science-based marketing strategies. 

Funded by a grant from Walmart, the report took into account a survey of FMI food retailer members representing 26,000 stores, a survey of roughly 1,400 adult U.S. shoppers, input from registered dietitian nutritionists and digital ethnography research. 

Food retailers are more closely linking their stores’ brand propositions to health and well-being, according to a report released in July by the Food Industry Association (FMI).

In a survey of 27 food retailers representing more than 26,000 stores, 85% of respondents — up from 54% in 2019 — said they view programs and offerings catering to people’s health as among the competitive factors for store brands when vying for customer loyalty.

FMI’s 2021 Retailer Contributions to Health and Well-being report indicates retailers’ will continue their efforts, with 69% of respondents saying the industry may see significant business growth by tapping into health-conscious offerings.

Retailers’ new efforts to focus on health and nutrition have been wide-ranging. Hy-Vee, Albertsons and Walmart have named new hires to health and wellness leadership roles, while Natural Grocers brought its nutrition education programs online. Heinen's launched a health membership program, and Raley’s has expanded its healthy-foods-focused O-N-E Market format.

Half of the food retail respondents to FMI's survey reported significantly or moderately boosting their health-conscious offerings since 2019, and a majority (84%) said they have a health and well-being strategy in place, up from 49% in 2019. 
 
Among their efforts, health education, like providing a pharmacy locator, COVID-19 vaccination information or a way to submit questions to a dietitian online, is a key focus, the report found. Of the companies surveyed, 65% said they employ registered dietitians corporately and 31% have them in stores or working virtually. Other roles to promote health include nutritionists (31%), health educators (8%), diabetes health educators (31%) and fitness trainers (8%).
 
The report also said food retailers have added or boosted virtual offerings and used multi-channel marketing to promote initiatives during the pandemic. The focus is not just on meeting shoppers’ demands: Many are offering healthy recipes, health screenings, meal planning resources, well-being classes and other benefits to their employees.
 
Food retailers are poised to focus more on nutrition, overall health, self-care, preventive care and emotional well-being going forward, FMI said. As companies become increasingly strategic with their approaches to health and well-being, FMI recommends they reset their strategies because COVID-19 increased focus on some aspects of health, like at the pharmacy, than on others. The trade group also suggests retailers seek more community engagement, collaboration and prevention measurements going forward. 
 
FMI also said a diversity of roles is key to staying on target when seeking consumers. “It’s crucial that dietitians and pharmacists are at the strategic decision-making table, but other leaders from across the store need to be on board as well,” the report said. “There’s also an opportunity to bring experts from both nutrition and pharmacy even more into the broader retail health and well-being discussion.”
 
Retailers have a chance to combine health-conscious efforts with personalized tools. In a study published in 2021, researchers from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health recommended three online tools: a “healthy shopping” preference setting, a healthy meal planning tool and a calculator determining the nutritional quality of items in shopping carts.

Schnuck Markets launched a program in January to help shoppers track their purchases of products that meet guidelines for healthy eating.

The free program, known as Good For You, adds data about the number of products that meet the nutritional standards to grocery receipts for customers who opt in.

An add-on to Schnucks' loyalty program, the new service spotlights products that comply with guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the American Heart Association.

These foods must be free of artificial flavors, sweeteners and colors and cannot contain more than relatively low levels of saturated fat, added sugars or sodium, Schnucks said in the announcement. The Good For You list features more than 5,000 items, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, eggs and lean meats, according to the grocer.

The program calculates the percentage of products a shopper buys that meet the criteria and displays that information on their receipt. In addition, participants will receive reports each month about whether they are making progress toward buying more healthy foods.

Schnucks is directing promotions at shoppers who participate in the program, including fitness-oriented YouTube videos and recipes on its website that use ingredients on the Good For You list.

The Good For You program is based on technology from Spoon Guru, a London-based startup that uses machine learning and in-house nutrition experts to help retailers analyze shopping behavior and identify trends. Schnucks worked with Spoon Guru to evaluate all of the food it sells and determine which items qualify for the Good For You label, Allison Primo, health and wellness strategy manager for the grocer, said in the press release.

The rollout by Schnucks of the Good For You program is part of a growing effort by food retailers to highlight healthy options for shoppers. In another example of this trend, Ohio-based Heinen's last year launched a health membership program that provides tools including shelf labels, weekly emails focused on nutrition and a coaching program that includes blood tests.

Also last year, Ahold Delhaize updated the graphics it uses as part of its Guiding Stars program, which uses shelf labels to help customers select nutritious products when shopping at its banners. Other grocers, including Hy-Vee, Kroger and Natural Grocers, offer virtual access to dietitians to help shoppers choose healthy foods.

Stop & Shop announced in January that it teamed up with Boston-based nonprofit About Fresh to address food insecurity, letting shoppers use prepaid debit cards “prescribed” by healthcare providers to buy healthy food/

Called Fresh Connect, the About Fresh-run program is available at more than 100 Stop & Shop stores in eastern Massachusetts and will reach the retailer’s entire fleet of more than 400 stores by early spring. 

About Fresh, which started with a mobile food truck, rolled out the Fresh Connect platform in 2018 in an effort to address health disparities, according to the organization's website. Healthcare teams enroll patients in the Fresh Connect program and can set monthly card disbursements, which are funded by healthcare organizations like Brigham Medicaid ACO, Brigham Women’s Faulkner Hospital and Boston Medical Center. About Fresh says its platform is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a federal law regarding the protection of patients’ sensitive health information.

The About Fresh Visa Reloadable Corporate Incentive Prepaid Card identifies eligible healthy foods while the customer is checking out. About Fresh tracks what shoppers buy with the cards and uses that information to generate monthly “activity summaries.” 
 
The nonprofit also offers a cardholder support line so that people can check their card balances, ask questions and find retailers, restaurants and farmers markets that accept the cards. Before Stop & Shop, people could use their cards at About Fresh’s mobile food trucks. 

Stop & Shop is the first major retailer to partner with About Fresh, per the emailed announcement. Josh Trautwein, co-founder and CEO of About Fresh, said linking up with Stop & Shop will give “thousands of people” access to Fresh Connect. 

Food insecurity is “continuing to impact the neighborhoods that Stop & Shop serves at an overwhelming rate,” Gordon Reid, president of the supermarket chain, said in the announcement. The retailer said the Fresh Connect program boosts convenience and access to fresh fruits and vegetables. 

In 2019, Giant Food, another Ahold Delhaize banner, announced plans to pilot a program called Produce Rx with nonprofit DC Greens to improve access to healthy foods to Washington, D.C.-area shoppers.

The announcement cited 2020 projections from the Greater Boston Food Bank that as many as one in seven adults and one in five children in eastern Massachusetts grapple with food insecurity, noting those estimates have increased during the pandemic. Feeding America estimates more than 38 million people, including 11.7 million children, are facing hunger across the U.S.

The nonprofit arm of the National Grocers Association created a workgroup last summer to explore functionality needed in point-of-sale solutions to make it more efficient for grocers to offer nutrition incentives.

Prescription programs were among the top five ways retailers can further food-as-medicine offerings, according to a report last year by the Food Industry Association and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation. The other four included personalized nutrition education, medically tailored nutrition, path-to-purchase marketing and incentive programs.

As grocers look to improve their online shopping experiences, many are looking at ways to further personalize the digital journey. 

To be more specific, they’re looking for ways to boost product discovery, and to hone the experience so that instead of combing through thousands of product listings — something that is nearly impossible to do on a screen, unlike in-store shopping — shoppers only view those products most relevant to them.

A study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health published in 2021 promotes the idea of personalizing shopping for a subset of consumers — in this case, those who are trying to lose weight.

Researchers at the university developed three tools that could effectively reach these shoppers: A “healthy shopping” preference setting, a healthy meal planning tool, and a calculator that tallies up the nutritional quality of their shopping carts.

Lead researcher Lisa Harnack said in an interview that surveys show that around half of obese individuals in the U.S. are trying to lose weight. Many others, she noted, are simply looking to eat healthier than they currently do.

Through in-depth interviews with research subjects — 25 in all — Harnack found that a major frustration with in-store shopping is that it offers too many temptations for those looking to shed pounds, like aisles filled with treats and the aroma of fresh-baked goods. Online shopping, on the other hand, can be curated to only include items that incorporate claims, ratings and other attributes specified by shoppers.

Many retailers currently offer tabs like “gluten free” and “low sodium,” but Harnack’s research found that grocers can go further by allowing shoppers to set preferences or create individual profiles that would essentially customize the shopping experience and maximize product listings that fall in line with their health goals and minimize those items that don’t.

“The online platform can allow retailers to do things that are not feasible to do in the store, like creating this tailored shopping experience,” Harnack said.

The team also found subjects were enthusiastic about a menu-planning tool that suggests healthy meal ideas in line with their preferences, and a calculator tool that indicates the overall healthfulness of their order along with tips for improving, like buying lightly salted nuts instead of the regular kind.

After conducting the 25 initial interviews, Harnack and her team sat down to develop their list of hypothetical tools. They then ran those proposals by 25 new subjects to determine the top choices. All test subjects were individuals over the age of 18 who were actively looking to lose weight.

Although the study’s sample size seems relatively small, Harnack said this was all the team felt they needed to get a sense of the core challenges these consumers face.

“After around the 20th interview, we weren't getting a whole lot of new insights,” she said. 

Grocers are used to offering shoppers as much choice as possible, so the idea of limiting those choices or lightly chiding people over purchase decisions may be a hard pill to swallow. But the very nature of digital shopping, which only allows consumers to scroll through one page at a time, seems to necessitate a pared-down experience. It’s also in grocers’ interest to help shoppers find new products they’ll like, since reordering products is an easy, ingrained habit for so many consumers.

Harnack said she hasn’t yet encountered a digital grocery experience that offers the depth of personalization her team outlined. She noted Shipt's feature that allows shoppers to sort products according to dietary labels like low sodium, organic and vegetarian, and save their preferences under a profile.

Most online platforms already use machine learning to push product recommendations to consumers, and that technology promises to keep advancing in the years ahead. E-grocer Hungryroot requires new customers to fill out a questionnaire and then uses machine learning and predictive modeling technologies to build shopping carts in line with their health preferences. Halla, a “taste intelligence” startup that uses artificial intelligence and data drawn from a wide range of sources, including restaurant menus, to offer product recommendations, just raised $4.5 million.

Harnack said she'd like to replicate the study with a more diverse lineup of subjects, since most of those involved were white women who were well-educated. She also said her team is looking to partner with a grocer to further develop and test online health tools.

“We know that Americans have struggled to eat healthy during the pandemic and people put on some weight that they don't want to be putting on," she said. "So now, more than ever, people are interested in healthy eating.”

Guiding Stars, the nutrition labeling program used by several U.S. Ahold Delhaize banners and other retailers, recently updated its logo and the graphics it uses to help shoppers more easily identify healthy foods when shopping in physical stores or online, according to a press release.

The revised star icons that serve as the visual centerpiece of the program now feature an apple and include the words "good," "better" or "best" in addition to the one, two or three gold stars Guiding Stars has used since inception to rate items.

Ahold Delhaize has used Guiding Stars to differentiate its grocery stores since 2006, when the Dutch company introduced the program at its Hannaford banner. Food Lion joined Guiding Stars in 2007, followed by Stop & Shop, Giant Food and The Giant Company, which began using the rating system in 2018.

Guiding Stars assigns one-, two- or three-star ratings based on algorithms that evaluate foods based on the nutrients and ingredients they contain. The program takes into account nutritional guidelines from federal agencies, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization.

Products earn points if they provide nutrients considered beneficial and lose them if they contain things like saturated fat, added sodium and artificial colors that are considered detrimental to health. Only foods that have positive ratings receive Guiding Stars graphics in stores and online.

​The updated one- and two-star graphics feature outlined stars to emphasize that those ratings are out of a possible total of three stars. Located in the center of the logo is a new compass design that indicates the direction Guiding Stars gives.

Shoppers can see the star ratings on product packaging and shelf tags and when viewing product descriptions online. E-commerce customers can elect to filter products based on the ratings they have been assigned.

Guiding Stars is also used by foodservice programs at the University of New Hampshire, a New Hampshire hospital and two middle schools in the state and at the University of North Dakota.

Ahold Delhaize is not the only grocery chain that provides customers with nutrition guidance as they shop. In January 2020, SpartanNash introduced a program called Nutrition Pathways that highlights 22 nutrition and lifestyle characteristics in stores operated by several of its banners and online.

Supermarkets have been stepping up their efforts to help customers make healthy eating choices as part of their efforts to maintain customer relationships they built as people heightened their shopping at grocery stores during the pandemic. For instance, a number of grocery chains, such as Hy-Vee and Kroger and Natural Grocers, offer customers virtual access to dietitians in an effort to help shoppers select healthy foods.