Creating Demand for Healthy Food

Across the country, retailers are adopting new and promising strategies to increase the sales and profitability of nutritious foods. In this section, you’ll find information on how in-store marketing practices and incentive programs are yielding healthy foods for consumers while increasing profits for retailers.

In-store marketing strategies can entice consumers to purchase healthy foods that increase the bottom-line profits of the grocery store, supermarket, or corner store. Research has shown that more than 60 percent of purchase decisions made in the store are unplanned. Effective and tactical approaches including self-signage, in-store coupons and incentive programs, video displays, sampling programs, store tours, value-added product and meal kits, and other prominent displays that can increase consumer interest in purchasing healthy items.

Learn more about key healthy food marketing strategies and organizations that are leading the charge to drive consumers toward the purchase of healthier products.

Key Strategies

  • Grow and develop in-store healthy food marketing strategies. Understanding in-store healthy food marketing strategies is vital for changing consumer purchasing of healthy food in stores. Check out the case studies below to learn about successful strategies working across the country.
  • Learn the four P’s of marketing. Healthy food marketing experts recommend that grocers become familiar with the four P’s of marketing—product, placement, price, and promotion—to increase the sale of healthy items in stores.
    • Product: Become more aware of the mix, quality, variety, and nutritional composition of products in your store, as well as how products are packaged by manufacturers or wholesalers. This will better position you to ensure you are selling healthy foods.
    • Placement: Product location and store layout greatly impact the purchasing decisions of consumers. Pinpointing and using prime locations to display healthy food, such as checkout aisles and end-of aisle displays, can hone your ability to sell specified items. Making sure healthy items are accessible at eye level can also bolster your ability to market these goods.
    • Price: Remain aware of how you incentivize purchasing through pricing. The implementation of sales, specials, branding, and differentials pricing practices can help you control how products are seen through the eyes of the consumer. Track whether discounts or other variations in the price of a product assist with sales.
    • Promotion: Consider using in-store marketing strategies and in-store nutrition education programs to connect consumers to healthy foods.
  • Coordinate with existing efforts. Grocers and other healthy food retail operators can partner with academic institutes, marketing firms, nonprofit organizations, public health departments, and other stakeholders to implement in-store marketing strategies. These partnerships can be tied to affiliated endeavors, such as SNAP education and nutrition education programs, and can encourage local support for individual grocery stores and supermarkets. Check out the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as one example. They offer free decals and other in-store marketing materials for store owners to use at no cost.
  • Develop incentive programs for healthy foods. Grocers and retailers can encourage the purchase of healthy food items by providing incentives. Loyalty programs that advertise healthy foods to consumers can boost the sale of healthy items and create a devoted customer base. Coupon programs being implemented across the country, such as The Food Trust’s Food Bucks program and Fair Food Network’s Double Up Food Bucks program, increase the purchase of healthy foods to the benefit of the consumer and retailer.
  • Tap into the demand for locally grown foods. Recent research shows that consumers are interested in supporting their local food economies by purchasing items produced in their state or community. Grocery stores and supermarkets can tap into this demand by purchasing and marketing products from local growers, wholesalers, and food hubs in their region.
  • Promote healthy food with cooking demonstrations. Retailers report these demonstrations contribute to keeping produce fresh and getting it out the door.

Key Organizations

Below are some organizations that have engaged in research or produced resources focused on creating consumer demand for healthy food, particularly in marketing healthy food and creating encouraging environments in retail settings.

Approaches to Healthy Shopping and Eating

The Food Trust’s Grocer’s Guide to Healthy Food Marketing provides key tools and resources to encourage healthy food purchases in grocery stores nationwide.

This report examines programs designed to influence individual food choices; presents a summary of evidence-based strategies that encourage healthy shopping and eating habits; and offers recommendations for further research. Given the growth of diet-related diseases as a public health risk in the United States, particularly among poor and minority populations as well as children, many are focused on slowing and reversing this trend.

Grocery Store and Retailer Scorecard

The 2016 Grocery Store and Retailer Scorecard webinar is modeled on a successful and similar self-assessment scorecard developed for school lunchrooms by the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture. This webinar presents the “Grocery Store and Retailer Scorecard” tool and features speakers that highlight the behavioral economics that informed the tool’s development and the research conducted with grocers on feasibility and retailer adoption.