Hello, and thank you for joining.
I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET Inosh, and I am excited to welcome you to The Nombase Podcast, a podcast built to help CPG owners and operators navigate growth challenges and build more profitable businesses.
Be sure to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community where you can find this episode and so much more. As brands grow, decisions around product positioning, data and retail partnerships start to overlap in meaningful ways.
Right now, health, nutrition and transparency sit at the center of that intersection.
Today's conversation explores how health data is moving from a marketing concept to real infrastructure inside grocery retail, shaping how health is defined and how it shows up in the shopping experience and what that shift means for brands building
for long term scale. My guests today are Sam Citro Alexander, CEO and founder of the Food Health Nutritional Scoring System and Laura Brown, Director of Nutrition at Kroger, who leads nutrition strategy in Opt Up.
We are going to talk about how the Food Health Score works, why Kroger chose to integrate it, how shoppers are engaging with health information and what brands should understand about building credibility, trust and momentum over time.
Sam and Laura, it is so great to have you here. I'm super excited about having this conversation with the two of you.
Awesome to be here. Any time I get to hang out with Laura is a great time for me, so ditto, ditto.
One of my favorite formats of this show is having two people who work really closely together from differing organizations, so this really is going to be a great show.
Let's start with introductions and find out who each of you are and how you know each other. Sam, let's start with you first. You didn't come to FoodHealth from a traditional food tech or retail background, right?
You're a former Estee Lauder executive. Can you walk us through what brought you into this space and how your own nutrition philosophy shaped things at FoodHealth?
I'm happy to. Yes, I'm a beauty girl at heart. It was an interesting transition from beauty to food.
There are a lot more similarities across the two industries than one might think, but that's another podcast for another day.
I spent the first decade of my career in beauty CPG, on working on brands like Clinique and Smashbox, particularly around positioning and marketing.
Very interestingly, beauty 10 or 15 years ago, was going through a very similar revolution to what food is going through right now.
On the beauty side, it was a big clean beauty revolution, where brands were pulling tons of ingredients out of products that had been there for 30, 40 years, as consumers began to demand better.
And we're seeing a very similar thing happen right now in food, but with even more complexity as we're looking at, not just ingredient specificity, but also a deeper understanding of nutrient density.
And it's been fascinating to watch this evolution, and I think very inspiring to see how consumers are even more empowered with information today than they ever have been.
And so, you know, my life journey brought me here to developing the FoodHealth score. I've had every diet related health condition under the sun at one point or another throughout my life, mostly gut related, but other stuff too.
And lots of other diet related health conditions run through my family. And we are an Italian American family. So food is very central to how we communicate, show love to each other.
It is deeply, deeply embedded in the fabric of who we are. And so navigating that love for food, deep love for food with all of these restrictions around food has been a challenge for my family for decades.
And in 2020, I was working on a beauty brand and my grandmother called me one day and said, Sam, I don't understand what's happened. I went to my doctor and she said that my A1C is off and I have pre-diabetes.
And if I don't fix it, I'm going to have to go on all this medication. And she's the type of person who thought she was eating really, really well. She is a fruit for dessert, vegetables at every meal grandma and instilled that in us.
And so for her, this was quite shocking actually to receive this information, this diagnosis. And she and I spent an afternoon, a Sunday afternoon going through her refrigerator and her pantry.
And it was then that I realized that she was having trouble, like many of us do, translating the principles or advice that she was getting from her doctor, like, you know, eat more whole grains with breakfast, translated to buying a granola product
that said whole grains on the front, but actually had 25 grams of added sugar when you flip it over and look at the back. And so we created the FoodHealth score to help people navigate the many, many, many pieces of information that go into
That is really such an amazing story, and I'm so interested to hear and to share with our audience how you translated those ideals into a system that could actually scale inside grocery retail.
That is no small feat. So you worked with Chris Fenucci, who the rest of our BevNET audience certainly knows from Coya.
How did you and Chris and the rest of the team figure out how to translate ideas like that into something that you can implement across retail with consumers, with brands? Because to me, that seems like it could have been a difficult translation.
It's very hard.
6:22
And Laura will tell you, it continues to be hard. I think it will never not be hard because I think for two reasons. Food data is very challenging, very messy, and poorly kept across every place that it lives.
And answering this question, what is healthy for me, is a really hard question to answer. It's quite personal. And in this moment, in this current environment, it's actually quite polarizing.
And so how do we maintain a level of scientific credibility and deep rootedness to what clinical nutrition tells us is true, while still translating that in a way that a consumer can understand and digest?
So yes, Chris is prolific in CPG founder land. And Chris came to this in a very similar way that I did. He's had diet related health issues in his family too, and has had family members who have had trouble navigating.
And so we both brought this very human problem to the table and said, okay, how do we think about solving it? And we borrowed from solutions that have existed before in complex data sets. And so if you want to understand your credit, right?
Which is a complex data set of all of your financial decisions, you can look at a credit score.
If you're in beauty and you want to understand the composition of a set of ingredients and how that impacts your skin, you can look at something like an EWG score. And so we said, what if we did something similar in food?
And we were not the first people to think of this. There have been other systems that have existed. NutriScore exists in Europe.
NuVal existed years and years ago. But I think we're at a very interesting technological moment where data challenges that were almost impossible to solve, you know, five or ten years ago, are now very possible to solve. Still not easy, but possible.
And so it was this confluence of personal experience, industry understanding from Chris' part of what food data actually looks like and what the limitations of that data are from a brand perspective.
And then this technology moment with the rise of AI and advancements in machine learning that allow all of this to be possible.
Well, one of the ways that consumers are seeing these scores right now is, of course, at Kroger.
8:56
How did you get introduced to the Kroger team and Laura to use the FoodHealth scores?
It's actually a very funny Chris story. So, I'm going to tell you the real story. I could tell you like the polished story, but I'm not going to.
No, no, no, we want the real story.
The real story is, so, before we were the FoodHealth company, which is what we have been for the last year and a half, we were a business called BiteWell.
And we had built a food as medicine marketplace, and we were working with health plans and employers to allow them to fund the purchases of healthy food for their employee populations.
And we actually developed the FoodHealth score as part of this food as medicine marketplace. It was the only place that it lived.
It both helped people to navigate selecting better food options, and it helped us to be able to filter through all of the brands that were reaching out about being merchandised on the marketplace and have a very data driven way of saying, yes, this
product can be sold because it meets the dietary protocol we've agreed upon with our health plan clients, or no, this product cannot. And through some interesting consumer work, we realized that the FoodHealth score was much more interesting than the
Food as Medicine marketplace that we had built. And people wanted the FoodHealth score to show up where they were already shopping.
And so Chris was at a conference where Jim Kirby from the Kroger team was speaking, Kroger Health's Chief Commercial Officer. And I think Chris basically stalked him down after Jim Brown's speech.
Yup, I can stalk him down.
Yup, yup, Laura's confirming. And said, Hi, I just heard you talking about nutrition and all of these things you're trying to achieve. I think we have a product that can solve your problem.
And the Kroger team was in the middle of an RFP process, and we were able to throw our hat in the ring. And through that process, ultimately ended up working together and it's been a wonderful relationship.
Certainly Kroger is using the health readings. Are there any other retailers at this time who have also picked it up? I know it's new.
Earlier this month, Hy-Vee also announced a rollout across all of their stores that has been getting some really awesome press.
Excellent.
Well, certainly we're looking forward to seeing more and more retailers pick that up. But for now, Kroger is certainly paving the way. Laura, thank you so much for joining us today on the Nombase Podcast.
You've been in the nutrition industry for a long time. You oversee nutrition programs for Kroger.
So for those listeners in our audience who might not be familiar with Opt Up, can you introduce your role at Kroger and also give us the backstory on Kroger's history with healthy eating and nutrition programs?
Laura Brown, I am the Director of Nutrition here at Kroger Health, a registered dietitian by trade, and I lead our strategy around nutrition, dietitians, and whatnot. Really my role has two pillars of it.
Health care, so how do we engage with dietitians and food as medicine services to help our customers who also are patients of ours because we have pharmacy in the majority of our stores in Kroger, to find health care assets that are in a convenient
location, in within a grocery store that they go to every week, numerous times a week, but then also the other arm is how do we think about nutrition as a key strategic pillar for our larger grocery merchandising strategy because we know that health
conscious shoppers are growing at an exponential rate and there's such an opportunity for us to think about nutrition and strategically to help customers find the products that they are looking for when they're shopping in our stores. So my role is
really interesting because I really get to dance alongside of both this health care arm of the Kroger company, but then also the larger merchandising space. When it comes to nutrition and food as medicine, I mean, Kroger has been doing this for a
long time. We have had dieticians for decades at this point. We've been thinking about food as medicine long before food as medicine was a hype word.
Our president of Kroger Health, Colleen Lindholz, who's a pharmacist by trade, has said loudly and proudly many times that her goal is for us to fill less prescriptions per person within our ecosystem, because our goal is to really help people live
healthier lives through other services, like meeting with our dieticians and finding healthier foods in our stores. We developed Opt Up as a standalone app within Kroger over a decade ago.
It was something that we created in-house with 8451, which is our data science side of the house. We had our own algorithm. It was a standalone app.
It got pulled into the Kroger ecosystem in 2021, I believe it was. But as Sam said, nutrition data is messy. It is really complex and incomplete often.
And so what would happen is the data would be incomplete. Maybe a decimal point would be off or it would say milligrams instead of milliliters. And it would go through the algorithm that we had made in-house and it would break.
And so we only had about 50 percent product coverage, and we did so many things internally to try to fix that. We worked with our data teams. We had our dietitians painstakingly staring at Excel sheets day after day to try to clean that data up.
And we just barely would push the needle. We do all this work and then it would go to 51 percent. We'd all want to bang our heads against the wall.
So as Sam mentioned, we went through an RFP process about two years ago with the intention of just finding a partner that could help us clean our nutrition data and help power our score itself.
And that is when we met the previous BiteWell Now Food Health Co. team. Fun fact is that I met with Chris after he stocked gym, and I immediately thought, oh wow, they would be probably a good partner for this.
But we had already closed our RFP. And I vividly remember pinging my leader saying, hey, we should reopen the RFP for this company. And he was like, no, that's already closed.
Like stop bothering me. And then I got him to meet with Chris, I think like two days later. And sure enough, we opened the RFP back up for you guys.
Laura is the real hero of this story.
Everyone needs to know.
And so yeah, we met them and they said, hey, listen, we can clean your nutrition data. I remember vividly their tagline during their presentations where this is what we do.
We can clean your nutrition data, we can power it through your score, but we also have our own score. So if you want, you can use our score too.
And while it was a hard decision to make because we had our own baby and we obviously loved our baby, it was the right decision to adopt a new scoring system for a couple of reasons.
One, it helped with our larger goal, which is to have a unified scoring system across retailers. So the fact that our competitor, Hy-Vee, now has the score is music to our ears. That was always our goal.
We wanted our score to be seen by consumers at every store because no one shops at just one grocery retailer. So you have to have a unified scoring system. And we knew that owning that scoring system ourselves would make that goal challenging.
The FoodHealth score also is extremely transparent. It is very mathematical, very algorithmic. Ours was not.
Ours was a black box. That made it really challenging working with brands who would want to understand, well, why is my product scored this versus my competitor? Or why is my product scored this?
I want it to be scored this. How do I get there? And so now we have a very mathematical, clear and transparent way to say, here's exactly where you're getting dinged, and here's what you have to do in order to make a healthier product.
And that just makes the whole strategy so much easier to implement because it's transparent and open for everyone to reach their goals.
Well, you've just certainly opened the door for us to talk about the nitty gritty around what the FoodHealth score measures and how it measures it.
Sam, at its core, what does the FoodHealth score evaluate and explain how nutrient density and ingredient quality work together in that system?
At the very highest level, what we are trying to do is say, okay, what dietary pattern, when consumed over a long period of time, does the best job at preventing and managing chronic disease? That's our goal.
We know that most Americans, unfortunately, at this point, are struggling with at least one diet related health condition, like type 2 diabetes or heart disease. And that is the number that we want to walk back.
So when we think about our North Star as a company, we do not get to rest until diet related disease diagnosis decelerates and eventually reduces. That's when we get to go sit on a beach in Hawaii for a little while, and take a breather.
But until then, there will be no Hawaii.
It's too bad because it's January.
I know. I'd love to be there right now, but we got work to do. So question one is, how do we assess a food's fit to that pattern?
And where a food fits in that pattern? Because truly, all foods fit in that pattern in some way. The primary dietary protocol that we are aligned to is the Mediterranean style diet protocol.
Because of the deep, rich, long body of evidence around its ability to prevent and manage chronic disease.
And then we supplement that, where there either isn't enough specificity or there is a nutrient deficiency or need that is specific to the American population with the dietary guidelines for Americans.
And so we look at those two things in the formulation of the score. If we go a level deeper, the score itself is assessing food on two axes, and you mentioned them.
One is a nutrient density axis, and so we create a nutrient density sub score that is a component of the overarching FoodHealth score. And the second is an ingredient quality axis. And we do the same thing.
We create an ingredient quality sub score. We call the ingredient quality measure as a component of the FoodHealth score. And those two things together give you your score from 1 to 100.
100 being, this is an awesome food, eat this all the time, this is a staple in your diet. 1 being, this has essentially no nutritional value, it might be delicious, so eat it occasionally, but, you know, not very often.
So each of those two sub scores, the nutrient density sub score and the ingredient quality sub score, have things that can boost it and things that can detract from it.
For the nutrient density sub score, we're looking at a ratio of beneficial nutrients, things like protein and fiber, to nutrients to limit, things like added sugar, added sodium, and yes, still saturated fat.
And then on the ingredient quality side, we are looking at ingredients that are health boosting, things like omega-3s or live active cultures, against things that are detracting, like artificial colors, preservatives, some types of artificial
sweeteners. And we do that on the ingredient side, at an ingredient by ingredient level.
And so, for example, when we think about artificial sweeteners, not all artificial sweeteners impact the score in the same way, because they all have a different body of evidence around them.
Ahead of major trade shows, food and beverage professionals across the industry are turning to BevNET and Nosh to stay informed. If you have a brand update, share it with us at submit.bevnet.com/news.
When you think about a nutritional fact like carbohydrates, you know, some diets limit those, some don't. Where do those fall on the nutrient density scale? Is it a good thing, a bad thing?
I would say neutral in terms of total carbohydrates, because what we are looking at is the fiber to carb ratio.
And then in terms of ingredient quality, I have to ask about seed oils.
The seed oil wars are still at large. How do those factor in to ingredient quality?
It's very interesting. So when we first developed the score, seed oils were a detractor, because the evidence that we were looking at, we were essentially looking at that, like, omega-3, 6 evidence that everyone was touting at the time.
And since initial development and all of the hubbub about seed oils, actually, a lot more research has come out that says, hey, hey, hey, wait, maybe it's not as we originally thought. Maybe this is more neutral than we originally thought.
And so we removed it. We removed it. And I say that transparently because I think it's important for everyone listening and really for everyone in the industry to know that nutrition science is a relatively young science.
And so there's new evidence coming out every day. And we have to look at the latest, best evidence as we're making decisions about how to recommend foods to people.
And so we relook at evidence every six months to say, has something new entered the ecosystem that we need to take into account.
What I'll just add to that is that was another reason why we Kroger were so excited about the FoodHealth score, because we knew that they had that type of case of ability to be constantly looking at the research because it is so young and it changes
so often. And we wanted to make sure that we could adapt to the research very quickly for the consumer so that they were getting the most evidence-based current information and not something that was going to get stuck in prioritization limbo land in
Sam, what about certifications like non-GMO, organic?
Do those play in anywhere?
Right now, no.
One of the reasons why, when we think about all of the possible things that we can look at when we're scoring a food, we need to look at both where is there a very large body of evidence around impact to health and specifically impact to chronic
disease because that's what we're optimizing for, and what is the data availability and coverage look like for that particular attribute? We choose not to include that attribute.
We include, for example, all macronutrients because all macronutrients are listed on a nutrition facts panel. We do not yet include all micronutrients because there's often not a data parity around macronutrients.
And so you might have two products that actually have the same content of, I don't know, vitamin B, pick a vitamin.
But one is on the label and one is not on the label, and those things might end up scoring differently in a way that is actually not helpful to the user.
I am exhausted just thinking about organizing all of this information. I mean, not only is it messy to begin with, like you say, it changes all the time.
Laura, you were just talking about how one of the benefits of using the FoodHealth scores, it works really well because there really is new research all the time and it's easy to update. How do those scores show up at Kroger?
I'm sort of picturing people like changing like a million labels at the point of sale, you know, like every single week, which hopefully isn't the case. But how do they show up on shelf? How do they show up online?
How do consumers interact with the scores?
Yeah, happy to give you some insight there. So how it lives today, we have the score listed on the product details page for every product on kroger.com and all of our banners.
So you want to learn more about your favorite yogurt, you click on the product, you scroll down to where the nutrition facts panel is, the scores listed right there.
So we're really helping the consumer to decode that nutrition facts panel and that ingredient list in the location that it is on our Kroger e-com experience and it's right there. You will see that for every single product.
In addition to that score, if you scroll down just slightly further, we have our Opt Up to Better Nutrition Carousel, which surfaces higher scoring similar products that the customer can opt up to. So that's our way to really help behavior nudge.
And within that carousel, you're going to see the scores of the products that you can choose from. You'll also see the scores for products in other health-related carousels throughout our Kroger ecosystem.
So any of our health pages, our weight loss pages, you're going to see scores listed there to help customers understand the healthness of those products.
If you were shopping in the New Year on kroger.com or on our app and went to the home page, there were lots of really great health-related carousels that were listing those food health scores, which we were really excited about.
So that's kind of where you see it today. We are launching a pilot in some of our banners where we're going to be tagging the most nutritious products within given categories.
So you won't see the actual score on the tags, but what you will see is a tag that says Opt Up Pick, and that's based off of the score. So we look at a category by category basis.
So for instance, we look at that yogurt category, we look at all of the scores for yogurts.
Then we take our dietician's expertise and put that consumer hat on to understand, okay, at what point when the score shift, is that where it makes sense to a consumer that, okay, now it's not maybe the saturated fat content is starting to come up
here, the added sugar content is starting to come here, and then we make that cutoff, and the ones that are higher and still left are scored. So it's tagged.
It's typically about 20% of the category that then is tagged on shelf or will be tagged on shelf to help the customer understand while quickly running down that aisle, maybe with children in tow to understand what is the most healthy yogurt that I
can choose from, top 20%. We're also going to be bringing the FoodHealth score into other experiences later this year.
Search and filter so that when someone is searching for a yogurt or a bar or a cereal, they can click, hey, filter and show me the most nutritious bars.
I was just doing this literally like two days ago, I was trying to buy a pasta sauce for my family. And I could remember the brand name off the top of my head, or I could remember the picture of it, but I couldn't remember the brand name.
And I was getting so frustrated because I was like, if this filter button was still here, I would find it, because I knew the score was in the 80s. Sure enough, I found it.
So it's going to help with that, because think of how many busy moms in particular, who are trying to just make the best convenient choice for their kiddos and for their family.
Our goal is to really help simplify it for the customer and make it easier for them to find the most nutritious category within where they're shopping.
As you've been mapping out how and where these show up, I can certainly understand how this scoring system is going to be able to drive consumer behavior and track it. So that'll be really exciting to see.
I can see how different categories might score differently just because of the nature of the product. So, you know, something like bok choy is probably a lot different than potato chips.
How do you account for the category differences and the nutrition scoring? Is there some allowance for different categories, understanding what they are typically made out of?
So, really interesting. When we were initially working through how should this whole scoring thing work, one of the things that we explored was category by category algorithms. And there are some scoring systems that do that.
What we found when we explored doing that is if you implement in that way, you end up with very strange jumps between products that don't necessarily make sense, because you might have a product in one category that has a very similar nutrition
profile to a product in a different category, and they have different category rules. And so, you'd see like a 47 on one and a 73 on another and not understand why.
What we did instead, I think was a really ingenious solve by our nutrition and data science team, is we look at because we look at ratios of beneficial to things to limit, we're able to apply a nutrient capping logic that essentially says, if you are
maxing out on fiber, but you don't have any protein, you could end up with a very similar score to a food that's maxing out on protein, but doesn't have any fiber. But that will be a different score than a food that is maxing out on both fiber and
protein. And so through that kind of mathematical solve, we were able to account for nutrient differences across different categories while maintaining the same algorithm and allowing the benefits of each nutrient to shine through with an
It is helpful.
31:13
And as it paints a very clear picture, it's making me wonder how the system is affecting buyer behavior at Kroger. Is this something that buyers are incorporating into their submission process when they're doing product reviews?
How important is the score into their decision making?
It's an opportunity that we're going to see hopefully in 2026 and beyond. We're trying to rally the cats across the entire enterprise to think more about the score.
Because we know, I mean, Sam has some really exciting data that she's done with Nielsen around where the most growth opportunity within categories is. And I'll let you speak for yourself, Sam.
But the TLDR is that those higher scoring products are the ones that are growing at a faster rate. We're seeing consumers looking for more nutritious products than ever.
So there's a huge business opportunity of like, how do we then use the score to consider whether or not to bring a product to shelf or to consider whether or not to make a product ourselves?
So that's something that we're definitely collaborating on to, you know, bring that to life in the most effective way for both of our businesses to, again, the goal here is to improve population health.
Sam, I think all the brands in our audience's ears pricked up when they heard Laura's comment about you having some data around where some of the biggest opportunity for brands is.
Can you share any of that where the, you know, where the white space is for healthier products?
Sure, of course. So we have two interesting data sets that we look at for this. The first is a really fantastic report that we put out in collaboration with Nielsen IQ.
It's public. So if you go to our website, you'll find it. It's called the Health of America's Grocery Carts, and it dives into what actually is in America's grocery carts from a nutrition perspective, category by category.
And then where are there categories where the category as a whole might not be growing a ton, but there is a subset of high health products, so high scoring products, that are growing exponentially?
One that I thought was really fascinating, and it's a case study that you can read about in the report, is fruit snacks. So fruit snacks as a category overall didn't grow a ton last year.
I'm going to quote numbers that are not correct, but it was something like 3%. The top 10% highest scoring products in that category, absolutely blew category growth out of the water, but only made up in total about 5% of overall category sales.
And so you have the small cohort of fruit snacks that are essentially 100% fruit, you know, leathers and snacks, etc. Growing, I think it was, I don't want to quote numbers that are wrong, but like 50X the category growth. It was wild.
But the thing that was most interesting to me is that when we looked at innovation in the fruit snacks category last year, the majority of innovation was still in those lower scoring fruit snacks, even though the highest scoring fruit snacks were
growing so much faster. If I'm a brand that has low scoring fruit snacks, what I'm saying is, oh my gosh, I should think about some innovation or maybe an acquisition in this space to capture that growth.
If I'm a brand that is creating those dark green, high scoring fruit snacks, what I might be saying is, this is an opportunity moment where I want to pump marketing and show this data to a set of buyers at different stores to help them understand
Laura, Sam has done a great job of describing the FoodHealth scoring system and what impacts those scores.
35:13
Certainly, it seems like the scoring system runs adjacent to so many of the diets that many of your shoppers are following. They may be on a GLP-1, they may be trying to control their blood pressure, they may be looking for a high protein diet.
How do the FoodHealth scores intersect with the eating patterns that Kroger consumers are adopting and have adopted now?
It's a great question. In the simplest terms, the FoodHealth score is the perfect tool for most, if not all, of those diets, because what the FoodHealth score is measuring is nutrition density.
If you're on a GLP-1, you need to eat nutrition-dense foods. If you have a chronic disease, you need to eat nutrient-dense foods.
So the FoodHealth score being just a basic tool to help you find nutrient-dense foods is right there to help you find the best products for you.
Now, there are some unique disease states as well as certain dietary preferences where maybe you have an additional layer on there, right? Maybe you are wanting to do a super high-protein diet and be keto.
So you could search by both the FoodHealth score and then put that additional layer of a high-protein filter on. And so that's one of the things when we think about what Opt Up is as a program here at Kroger, it's not just the FoodHealth score.
I mean, that is certainly the foundation for sure, but it's also those dietary filters and attributes because the customer can then use both together to find the products that are best for them.
So something that is nutrient-dense, but also meeting their need of no sodium because they are dealing with hypertension or looking for something for a disease state like kidney disease where they need to follow very low protein intake, for instance.
So it can certainly vary, but I would say the FoodHealth score is a component for all of those preferences.
And what are some of those filters that you're seeing customers tick the most frequently? You mentioned high protein. I know that's one.
Yes, it is. Are there any other interesting trends around the filters that consumers are looking for right now?
Yeah, high protein definitely. You can't go anywhere with hearing about protein right now. I think fiber is definitely, you know, 2025 was the year of protein.
I think 2026 is going to be the year of fiber. So we're seeing definitely an increase there, which is really exciting from a nutrition expert, dietitian standpoint to see.
There's also just a lot of, you know, focus on no added sugars right now, especially with the new dietary guidelines, like really putting a focus on limiting added sugar intake, which is fantastic.
Definitely an area for opportunity for population health.
And then I think there's just a lot of interest around the, you know, artificial ingredients, food dice of that nature as well, which especially for a select part of the population, definitely is really beneficial for their health outcomes and
Sam, it's clear that fitting into the scoring system makes sense for brands as a whole, based on what consumers are looking for, you know, the trends that Laura just mentioned and the ones that you've uncovered, putting this all together.
38:29
But at the end of the day, it's still a food, it's still a beverage, it has to taste good.
What are some of the patterns that you see across brands, whether they are formulating or reformulating, that help them balance strong scores with repeat purchase?
Our expertise is bringing the nutrition data to the table, and saying from a nutritional perspective, this is what people are looking for. Then the brands team, they are the ones who are the experts on taste.
While we provide recommendations about tweaks or changes they can make to improve nutrition quality, that is where our work ends and where the brand's work begins.
What I think is super interesting is in this world where almost everyone is looking for, not everyone, but the majority of shoppers are looking for more protein, more fiber, less sugar, in some cases, less sodium.
The Nutrition Facts panels are all starting to look a little bit more similar. And so where brands can create unique value is in taste.
Because if every pancake batter now has 12 grams of protein added to it, that's no longer your differentiator, that's your table steak. And now taste becomes your differentiator or flavor or some other unique component.
And so I wouldn't say that there is one thing that every brand is doing. What we're seeing is that every brand is doing something different to create space between them and their competitor.
Are there any interesting ingredients, for example, that you're seeing brands swap out like a, you know, a higher protein flour for a lower protein or a fat substitute or, I mean, certainly there are so many non-nutritive sweeteners.
Are you seeing any interesting substitutes?
Yeah, we're hearing a lot about alulose. So, that has come up in probably 12 different conversations over the last three weeks. So, I expect that we'll see more and more alulose hitting the shelves.
You know, I heard alulose described as sort of a natural GLP-1.
I feel like I haven't heard that as much recently, but I'll be interested to listen and see if it keeps coming up or if it sort of dies by the wayside.
So, I want to make sure that all of the brands out there understand not only the scoring system itself, but really understand what the opportunity is for them in their Kroger partnership.
Laura, what do brands most often misunderstand about how nutrition scores like these factor into things like getting on shelf, merchandising and long-term partnership, and what do they really need to know?
Yeah, I think I'll answer the second question first in that they need to know that this is just the beginning.
Kroger Health, the healthcare side of the organization, has been on this journey for quite some time, but the rest of the larger grocery portion of our business were right at the beginning.
So, there's so much opportunity to really lean into the score, lean into the trends, lean into what the consumers are asking for around health and nutrition.
So, we are really looking for brands that are excited about the score, that are excited to collaborate and shout out from the rooftop.
We have some brands that have collaborated with us on co-branded marketing, both digitally with KPM, our precision marketing team, as well as in-store signage, both traditionally right by on their shelves, but also in unique places like our clinics
and our pharmacy, to really shout from the rooftop that they're a nutrition forward brand based off of their FoodHealth score and that they are proudly an opt-up pick. There's opportunities to have placements on our nutrition insights page, which is
a really fun personalized nutrition shopping dashboard that all customers have access to, where you can go and understand what is your household's grocery purchases, what's their overall score look like, and where are their opportunities for you to
opt up and choose more nutritious products. So you can feature your brand on that page. But also if you're a higher scoring product, you're going to just be featured on there naturally.
And so I think that's the maybe the misconception is that you have to pay to play. Like if you're sold in our stores, we're scoring you. Sorry, not sorry.
And then you, you know, but if you're a higher scoring, you're going to be featured just organically naturally in many places, like on the Opt Up to Better Nutrition carousels, in the Health Forward pages, on the Nutrition Insights Dashboards.
Now, if you want to take a next level and invest and collaborate and support your scores by doing additional marketing, we're happy to join hands and do that with you, but you don't have to.
You're just going to naturally be featured as a better for you brand.
Excellent. Sam, you discussed some of the messy issues that nutrition scoring has had previously and how the food health scoring system aims to clean it up a little bit. So, let's paint a very clear picture for all of the brands out there.
What do they need to know in order to get involved with the program, to get a score? Give us the lowdown on that. And then also from a consumer perspective, tell us what we need to know if we would like to jump in and start scoring.
Absolutely.
So, my number one message to brands is please make sure that your nutrition data is accurate in all of the places where you enter it. Please, please, please.
And if it is not or if you think that it is not, reach out to wherever you put that data in or reach out to us. We can correct it on our end as well. So, please let us know and help us to make nutrition data better.
The other thing that I would love brands to know is that in the same way that Laura mentioned that there is an opportunity to collaborate with each of the grocery partners individually that showcase the FoodHealth score, there's also an opportunity
for brands to collaborate with us directly. We work with a lot of brands in the R&D process to provide specialized nutrition insights and consumer insights that help you to make those products that will end up getting featured on Laura's carousels,
so we would love to help you with that work. On the consumer side, you can find the FoodHealth score at all of the Kroger banners, you can find the FoodHealth score at Hy-Vee, and one of the main questions that I got over and over and over again last
year was, well, what if I don't shop at those stores? What if I live in New York, they're not available to me, how can I use the FoodHealth score?
And so earlier this month, we launched a Chrome extension that you can download on your laptop and it will follow you around to all of the places that you shop that don't have the FoodHealth score yet and help you to see scores of products and find
some healthier options. So eventually, the FoodHealth score will be imbedded, I am manifesting, in every single grocery environment across the country, but until then, you can use our tools directly and they're free.
Well, thank you so much, Sam Citro Alexander, founder and CEO of FoodHealth, and Laura Brown, Director of Nutrition at Kroger. Anytime we can make some order out of chaos, it's definitely a win.
So thank you so much for explaining this program and how it works at Kroger. For everybody else in the audience, thank you for tuning in to The Nombase Podcast, and we'll see you next time. That concludes another episode of The Nombase Podcast.
If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice.
You can also watch and listen to past episodes on nombase.com, and don't forget to join our Nombase Slack at slack.bevnet.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions. See you next time.
