A New Vision Of The Grocery Store
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
It is undeniable that supermarket retailers have good reason to focus on health and wellness programs. Health care is one of the fastest growing areas of the economy, and there is a sense that traditional methods of delivering health care, mostly through doctors, is simply too expensive. So the future seems to be an odd dumbbell, with lots of primary care providers — such as physicians assistants and nurses delivering primary care often at an in-store clinic — and then very high-end specialists to help when one is discovered to have a serious illness such as cancer.
It is also clear why supermarkets would want to emphasize various healthy eating objectives. The basic retail model is for supermarkets to sell what customers want to buy, which isn’t typically healthy. So by emphasizing dieticians and healthy eating programs, supermarkets position themselves on the side of the angels. Retailers can be presented to the public, the media, non-governmental organizations, and the government as doing its bit to fight obesity and make the populace healthier.
Fighting for programs that encourage family dinners at home make retailers look engaged and concerned, and it allows stores to promote something most clearly in their interest — eating at home.
Yet the exact role supermarkets play in boosting health is uncertain. Having a dietician on staff is nice from an image point of view and, perhaps, a dietician can sway consumers on the margins through a column, video or interview with a journalist. But dieticians aren’t given authority to veto assortment choices. Even if they were, people are very diverse. Obesity may be the big, publicly discussed problem. But there are people who are underweight, young children with different nutritional needs, people undergoing chemotherapy, people who exercise many hours, etc. The issue is what people choose, not what is available.
Somewhere in all this, though, one senses a new definition of the grocery store beginning to emerge. The dietician, the chef, the pharmacist, the in-store clinic, the cooking school, etc., somehow retailers are sensing that the days when they could point to consumer choice as a justification for selling anything are winding down.
When one looks to purchase stocks, one has to fill out an information sheet that, among other things, forces an individual to declare his or her investment goals. Is it preservation of capital or a wild race to maximize returns? Is all you have in this one account? Or do have many reserves elsewhere?
Perhaps we could imagine a world developing where consumers would make similar declarations with their eating and health goals, and grocers would collaborate with consumers to help them achieve their goals or the goals set for the family.
How this might evolve is unclear. Will it be mandatory? We require people to get prescriptions for many medicines, yet the food one eats, the type, the quality, and the quantity can impact one’s health just as dramatically.
Will it be an upscale indulgence? Like having a personal trainer, whereby the rich will get advised and they and their families will become healthier than those who cannot afford the counseling?
Or maybe technology will bring what is now costly advice down to a price almost everyone can afford.
Imagine your Apple Watch cautioning you that you are buying whole milk, and your goal is weight reduction, so you would better off with skim. Or maybe you are picking up a prepared food, and your Artificial Intelligence system reminds you that you are on a low-sodium diet, so it downloads a simple recipe telling you how to make the dish yourself with less sodium.
Maybe the grocery store of tomorrow won’t actually stock much food. Maybe it will only have a little convenience store-like section. Space might be given over to counselors and medical personnel of different types, and — in the context of working with them — one orders everything, but the items are delivered directly to the home. The real estate in grocery stores is better used for interactive engagement.
It all seems a little science fiction right now, but the trends are there. Though the past is always prologued to the future, the future can’t always be grasped from the present.