Online Grocers: Are you healthy enough?
Everywhere you go, you can see ads for diets, healthy living or gyms. The media are full of stories about Madonna's personal trainer, the slow food organisation or TV shows such as "You are what you eat" in the UK. But one place is strangely very shy about this global phenomenon: our local grocer! Only a few grocers have addressed this issue seriously and as usual there are a lot of things that grocers could achieve online that would not be possible in the brick and mortar world - here are a few best practices to start with:
1/ Calorie checker - My Supermarket:
The first idea will be to help people choose products with fewer calories to help them reduce their intake. This will be particularly appreciated by people trying to loose weight as you could easily imagine it. Mysupermarket.co.uk has a good example of such a feature with their Health Checker, basically they propose to their customers alternatives with fewer calories. A very simple idea, which remains unmatched by online grocers in the UK.
They also have what they call "Traffic Lights" which are helphing their customers comparing Fat, Saturated Fat, Sugar and Salt with a colour indicator (Green, Amber, Red). Again it remains unmatched by most grocers.
2/ Guiding Stars - Hannaford:
Comparing every product to find a healthier option can be difficult and not all of us want to spend time looking at every detail (fat, sugar, salt, vitamins etc...). For most of us, we want our grocery shopping to be quick and enjoyable. Since we are now quite used to ratings and reviews, Hannaford has created a program which helps their customers choose healthy options in the blink of an eye: The Guiding Stars Program. They have asked nutritionists to evaluate their grocery products and rate them depending on their nutritional values on a scale of 1 to 3.
Hannaford is not selling groceries online but they have leveraged this program to show to their customers how they can save money in opting for healthier products or cook healthier with a set of recipes.
3/ Foodflex - Safeway:
Foodflex is probably the most sophisticated nutrition program created by a grocer. Through Foodflex Safeway customers can see their purchase history and see trends by nutritients over a period of time and compare it with the advised quantity. The Foodflex program also helps Safeway's customers pick healthier alternatives depending on the nutrients they are interested in.
The Foodflex program is not yet integrated with the online shopping experience as Safeway customers can only print a list of products and then go and buy them in-store or online. But you could easily imagine such a program being the source of a personalised recommendation section of a site where you could ask such a tool to optimise your shopping for a specific need (e.g. I want to increase my Calcium intake or reduce my Salt intake).
Conclusions:
Health and Fitness are two major worries for the online groceries shoppers but so far most of the grocers have failed to match their expectations. The online channel can be the most effective in this domain as the shoppers could set up a fully personalised experience (e.g. I want to reduce fat, I am allergic to peanuts) through basic configurators and grocers could benefit from this by proposing a differentiating service helping them gaining market shares. Personalisation in the groceries world is more about responding to shoppers' physical needs than running marketing campaign based on segment. Grocers, who understand this, will probably see a substantial increase in revenue in the coming years.
Comments
Very good article and comments. Personalised experience and maximum-targeted information about products is the way to move forward. However, care should be taken that by providing targeted information, one is not cannibalising or killing a profitable product line, which may not fit into target category (Healthy in this example).
Few questions grocers need to evaluate are
1.How many of my customers are health cautious? What is the current sales and future potential of this category? Do we need to target only this segment or entire segment?
2.What is the distribution of products in terms of ‘guiding star’ rating or ‘healthy’ rating? Will there be an impact on best performing products if they get a low rating?
3.Do we want to provide information (such as ‘calorie checker’ or ‘guiding star’) on product display or ‘on demand’ by customer.
Once they have evaluated benefits as well as ‘potential’ losses, grocers should decide on how and when they want to capitalise on global ‘Health and Fitness’ fad.
Posted by: Tushar Dani | January 29, 2009 2:30 PM
Tushar – good suggestions.
Yes, you are right, customer segmentation and impact analysis on margin have to be performed before grocers are embarking in the well-being/health journey. But two things they have to consider on top of that:
1)A few grocers are already seeing their market share decreasing (see my post: http://infosysblogs.com/multi-channel-retailing/2009/01/online_grocers_welcome_to_the.html) and offering new services as a way to attract new segments or retain customers. Grocers have to increase or at least maintain their level of sales first.
2) The demand for well-being/health will soar in the coming years in the USA and Europe as you can see reports explaining how obesity, diabetes or allergies are becoming mainstream. In the UK, we are already used to see GDA (Guideline Daily Amount) on our groceries and it is likely that customers will ask for more. Being known as a health-conscious grocer will probably have a very positive impact on the grocer’s brand and be a strong differentiator – on the contrary being known as a grocer not helping the community being healthier will probably be very damaging.
Posted by: Guillaume Vingtier | February 3, 2009 9:21 AM
You raise some interesting points. Are you suggesting that dietary requirements for shoppers should be stored based on purchase/browse history or based on the configuration by the shoppers themselves?
I would say that in a social climate where healthy living is consistently promoted, online grocers have the potential to mix both online shopping and recommendations for maintaing a healthy life style. www.weightwatchers.com shows an example of this as their website promotes dieting via healthy living as well as exercise tips and recipes. They already have incoporated the nutritional values of thousands of products from many UK retailers.
Posted by: Jonathan Nobbs | February 11, 2009 5:38 PM