Healthy eating recommendations continue to evolve, with the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) June 2011 nutrition guidelines emphasizing leading roles for fruits and vegetables. The USDA recommends that you fill your plate half full of these brightly colored foods, eliminating confusing serving rules that may have discouraged you from improving your diet in the past. Making these and other healthy foods accessible to consumers, and creating consumer demand for the foods, means retailers must utilize innovative marketing and promotional strategies.
Informational Signage
Browsing through the supermarket often means wading through aisles of nutritionally incomplete or deceptively labeled food products. In 2009, Maryland-based chain Giant Food Supermarkets addressed this confusion by providing its shoppers with the Healthy Ideas nutritional labeling program. Giant posted product labels storewide that alerted shoppers to healthy perishable and non-perishable foods. The Healthy Ideas program continues in 2011, and portrays Giant Food Supermarkets as a corporate entity interested in its customers' health.
Menu Planning Assistance
Implementing a healthier eating regimen means selecting daily and weekly menus that incorporate nutritious foods. Your demanding schedule, combined with a bewildering array of cookbooks and online resources, may mean menu planning gets pushed into the background. Healthy food retailer Whole Foods Market features a website-based menu planner that includes seven days worth of breakfasts, lunches and dinners. The planner links to each day's recipes, and also features an ingredient shopping list. The online menu planner and shopping list serves to position Whole Foods Market as their customers' partner in healthier nutrition.
Locally Grown Healthy Food
Your community often provides healthy food offerings in non-traditional retail environments. Roadside markets, commonly packed with just-harvested local produce, are a desirable option for both local residents and visitors. Farmers' markets offer a centrally located venue for regional farmers to market produce and homemade food products. Street produce carts may provide another retail produce option, although the carts may be limited by zoning or location restrictions.
Urban Healthy Food Retailing
Urban populations typically have limited access to healthy food retail outlets. Historically, when healthy foods have been available in low-income urban areas, high prices and poor quality have led to low consumer demand. In 2006, a Baltimore-based pilot program called Baltimore Healthy Stores recruited seven Korean-American corner grocery stores and two urban supermarkets in East Baltimore. Program organizers sought to both introduce healthy foods to low-income local residents and to create demand through food tastings and point-of-purchase literature. This nine-month study, published in the journal "Health Promotion Practice," illustrated that local grocery stores provide a convenient venue for introducing healthy foods. The stores also furnish an appropriate platform for healthy food choice reinforcement efforts.
References
- Fruits & Veggies More Matters; What Is a Serving of Fruits and Vegetables? Fill Half Your Plate; June 2011
- Retailing Today.com; Giant Food Gives Customers Healthy Ideas; January 2011
- Whole Foods Market: Menu Plan and Shopping List
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Retail Food Stores: Small Retail Locations
- "Health Promotion Practice"; Process Evaluation of Baltimore Healthy Stores: A Pilot Health Intervention Program With Supermarkets and Corner Stores in Baltimore City; Joel Gittelsohn, Ph.D., et. al.; September 2010
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