Grocer Rating Foods for Healthiness
When grocery shopping, it’s often difficult to identify healthy food choices, especially with packaged foods that consumers increasingly seek for sake of convenience.
(See last week’s post discussing convenience as the primary driver of food choice.)
Now it seems that at least one grocer is trying to help consumers sort through all the health claims made by different food manufacturers. A New England grocery chain, Hannaford Brothers, has developed a system that assigns each food in its stores a health rating from zero to three stars.
The results were interesting, to say the least:
Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you.
These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat — no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal.
Of course, food manufacturers were not pleased with this rating system and its results.
Hannaford assembled a panel of nutritionists and evaluated foods using a more stringent and broader set of criteria than those set by the F.D.A. and used by food manufacturers to make health claims.
Hannaford formed a seven-member advisory panel of nutritionists and a physician to develop a formula for evaluating the healthiness of food. That algorithm evaluates a 100-calorie serving of each product using only the information that is available on the “nutrition facts” panel and the ingredients list. A product receives credit for vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and whole grains, but is docked points for trans fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, added salt and added sugar…
…The food agency sets standards that food manufacturers must use when they define a product as, say, low in fat or high in fiber, and companies may use those designations even if the product is loaded with less desirable ingredients……Many packages trumpet the benefits of a few attributes — high fiber, for instance, or no trans fats — while ignoring negatives like too much sodium…
Even the FDA acknowledges that its guidelines can only go so far:
“The thing is, a lot of claims we see out there are puffery,” said Joseph R. Baca, director of the office of compliance at the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “But they don’t get to the point where we can call them fake or misleading.”
What do the ratings results say about the food industry and consumers? The article concludes:
Nutritionists and food industry analysts said that Hannaford’s findings highlight some unpleasant truths about Americans and their eating patterns. People want to be healthier but do not want to change their behavior, and so marketers have stepped in with products that improve on the originals but still leave something to be desired.
I definitely agree, but I also think there is a segment of the population that is focused on consistently selecting healthy food choices. AND, importantly, that that segment is growing. Ratings systems like this one can help busy people to make better choices. Hopefully more grocery chains will use such a system in the future.
