Kroger Health President Colleen Lindholz addresses the crowd as the grocer’s Nourishing Change Conference.

While many grocers wouldn’t invite their competitors to collaborate on ways to improve health outcomes in the United States, The Kroger Co. is doing just that this week through its inaugural Nourishing Change Conference in Cincinnati. 

Kroger Health President Colleen Lindholz spoke with Progressive Grocer during the event about how the food retailer is creating change within its own ecosystem, and stressed to the conference audience that it wants to collaborate across the grocery and health care industries to keep that momentum going. 

The food-as-medicine movement, which has become a cornerstone for many players in the grocery industry, has been around for many years, but as Lindholz shared, Kroger is now focusing on personalizing it for customers based on their current life journeys, from a young person seeking maximum performance in sports to midlife and beyond. 

One way Kroger is doing that is by providing FoodHealth Company’s (formerly bitewell) FoodHealth Score to its customers nationwide, helping them instantly identify foods that align with their health goals. The scoring system seeks to give customers a fast, reliable way to evaluate the healthfulness of their food, and can be viewed while shopping online or within the Kroger app. Customers can also access the FoodHealth Score in-store by scanning a product’s UPC codes.

“We’re bringing simplified tools to the market and I think that’s the key – helping people make healthier food choices and making it easy for them,” she said. “With our nutrition scoring system that we’ve been working on for quite some time, it’s easier now for customers to shop commodities like cookies, crackers, yogurt, cereal, and things like that, and to better understand from a nutritional value standpoint which one’s better for them.”

Lindholz said that while Kroger doesn’t have it all figured out, partnerships like the one with FoodHealth Company, have been an important part of bringing its customers the tools they need to help improve health outcomes. Additionally, she hopes broader adoption of those tools will spur even better outcomes across the country.

“We aspire that a nutrition scoring system would be used by all grocers in this country, that we would be able to have more transparency around food,” she explained. 

Beyond that personalization and outside collaboration, Lindholz believes having the right health care professionals available at the right time is important for Kroger’s customers, which is why the grocer has dieticians on its staff. Those dieticians can meet customers where they are, whether it’s in the grocery aisles or online from the comfort of their own homes.