From The Summer 2005 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

New dietary guidelines become sales opportunity

O’rya Hyde-Keller

The dietary guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have generated a lot of buzz. There’s a good chance your customers have heard about them and that many are interested in following them toward a more nutritious diet. Because many health-minded shoppers are already headed for your natural foods section, this is an ideal place to educate them and offer resources for healthier eating. The new guidelines have increased emphasis on “good” fats, whole foods and fiber-rich foods, items that are most likely already on your shelves. You just have to show customers the way there.

Guideline confusion
Though many customers may be familiar with the new guidelines, it may be difficult for them to translate the avalanche of information into decisions about what kinds of food to buy. Educating yourself, your staff and consumers about the healthy foods outlined in the guidelines is the first step in getting customers to seek out those foods.

“People walk into stores, and they’re overwhelmed and they don’t have a clue what to buy,” says Jennifer Workman, a registered dietitian and owner of The Balanced Approach, a Boulder, Colo.-based nutritional consulting company. “Education sells. If people understand that [they] can still be healthy but have their food taste good and be quick and easy, people are sold and sales go up.”

Some common sources of confusion that you should be able to answer questions about—and take advantage of—are:

• Serving size. The new guidelines suggest eating four servings of fruits each day and five servings of vegetables. Without knowing what a serving size is, this can seem like a lot to eat in one day. In reality, the USDA’s recommended serving is only half a cup, about the size of a medium piece of fruit. Workman suggests placing signage next to the appropriate products, offering suggestions on how to seamlessly incorporate fruits and vegetables into customers’ diets: “Cook up a big stir-fry with onion, chard, shiitake mushrooms and bok choy. Add fresh or frozen veggies to scrambled eggs. Buy cans of soup and throw in a cup of baby peas and carrots.”
  Other suggested diet amounts, as defined by the dietary guidelines (and based on a 2,000-calorie diet): Each day people should eat 6 ounce-equivalents of grains (one ounce-equivalent is one-half cup of cooked rice or a slice of bread); 5.5 ounce-equivalents of protein (one ounce-equivalent is an egg or one-quarter cup of cooked dried beans); and 3 cups of dairy (1 cup equals about 1 1/2 ounces of low-fat cheese).
• Whole grains. “The new dietary guidelines … now call specifically for at least three servings of whole grains per day, but finding proper sources of whole grains can be challenging,” says Matthew Cox, marketing coordinator for Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based manufacturer of unrefined, whole-grain products. “Consumers should look specifically for the term whole grain in products’ ingredient statements to verify the inclusion of whole grains.” Cox added that some food manufacturers replace a small bit of refined grain in their product with whole grain to tout the product’s health benefits, but often the ingredients label betrays products that are still high in processed grains, sugars and sodium—all ingredients that the new guidelines suggest people watch out for. Give customers an easy way to find whole grain products. Bob’s Red Mill, for example, was the first to nationally distribute products with the Whole Grain Council’s Whole Grain Stamp, a symbol that will help consumers identify whole grain products. The Whole Grain Council hopes that more companies will adopt the stamp, making it a good consumer education tool to look out for in the future.
• Fiber. Fiber-rich foods top the dietary guidelines’ “Food Groups to Encourage.” When people think of fiber, they often think of bread, but fiber-rich foods also include fruits, vegetables, beans and nonwheat grains like amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa. Workman suggests steering your customers toward these fiber-rich alternatives in order to add diet variety and provide options for the growing number of gluten-intolerant individuals.
• Fats. Trans fats are a big no-no in the updated guidelines. But it may be hard for customers to identify products that contain trans fats, and many might not know that foods such as margarine and many conventional low-fat snack foods, which they once thought were good for them, actually aren’t. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given manufacturers until January 2006 before they are required to include trans fats on their nutrition labeling. Until then, customers should scan the ingredients label for the words partially hydrogenated as an indication that a product contains trans fats. Common culprits include crackers, cookies, fried foods and baked goods, as well as margarine and vegetable shortening. Workman suggests touting good-fat products like olive oils by giving cooking demonstrations and distributing recipes using nutritious trans-fat alternatives.

A marketing opportunity
The new dietary guidelines are a great potential marketing tool. The key here is to make it easy for your customers to understand the guidelines and translate them into healthy choices—and to make those choices appealing.

Marty Baird, founder of Nutritionalmarketing.com, suggests an all-out marketing campaign that revolves around the guidelines. “If this is going to be part of your marketing mix, it needs to be part of everything—billboards, advertising, PR,” he says. “This means that you have to have in-store merchandising, talkers in front of the different items that give breakdowns and explain what’s going on, and articles on the subject available to the consumer.”

Baird also recommends a signage system in which different foods recommended by the dietary guidelines are identified by different symbols. So, for example, fruits and vegetables may be identified by triangles, whole grains by squares, calcium-rich foods by diamonds and fiber-rich foods by circles. This is a way, he says, to set your store apart from others and encourage people who find the system helpful to return to your store. The natural foods aisle is an ideal place to try out this kind of system. It’s also an idea, says Baird, that can easily translate to online shopping, where pop-ups can educate people about the ingredients in the products they order and make suggestions for USDA-suggested foods that might be missing in their online shopping basket.

“When it comes to educating consumers, you can’t really overeducate,” says Baird. “And the places that go out and help educate are going to be head and shoulders above the rest.”

O’rya Hyde-Keller is a freelance writer in Madison, Wis.