This new strategy is part of the company’s healthier food initiative to provide simple labelling for products which comply within ‘rigorous nutrition criteria’.
The icon, part of the company’s healthier food initiative, is an effort to implement a transparent label for its private label brand products.
‘Great For You’ will initially appear on select Walmart Great Value and Marketside items, including on fresh and packaged fruits and vegetables at Walmart US stores nationwide this spring.
“When it comes to food, our customers want a variety of choices, but they also want help identifying healthier options. Customers asked us to make healthier food choices easy while keeping prices low,” said Jack Sinclair, executive vice president of grocery for Walmart.
As much as I admire the grocery giant for taking a positive step in what they claim to be a ‘tool to help consumers make healthier choices,’ it always crosses my mind that marketing and trends is far more important to the people at the top, rather than health. In the same way that when demand for functional food and drink became the new health buzz, it seemed that suddenly every new product hitting the market claimed to be functional in some way and, in many cases with no proof to support such claims. Dollar signs were in the air which clouded any ability for companies to adhere to legislative guidelines causing doubt and confusion among shoppers and health enthusiast alike on what, and who to trust.
It can’t be assumed that a new healthy labelling scheme adopted by such a big retail store is as ‘transparent’ as the store makes out. As the Center for Science in the Public Interest highlights: “Walmart’s programme does an excellent job of highlighting healthful foods in many food categories, but it is not fool-proof. Some distinctly not-?great-?for-?you foods qualify for the symbol: cholesterol-rich eggs, salty canned vegetables and salt-?water-?injected fresh meat and poultry, nutrient-poor apple and grape juice, and grain foods that contain much more refined white flour than whole grain.”
This is not a new problem. For years, products displaying health claims such as ‘low fat’ or ‘healthier option’ have time and time again confused shoppers who rely on labelling to dictate to them what is a better choice in a world where the media creates a vortex of reports on obesity and diet-related ailments.
In labelling terms, ‘low fat’ has a completely different meaning to that of ‘reduced fat’, and therefore two products with these claims can contain a completely different fat content. A pork pie has never been a healthy product in a nutritional sense, but it could be named ‘reduced fat’ if it has a percentage fat content below a particular threshold compared to its traditional pork pie counterpart. Despite this the product labelled ‘reduced fat’ could easily be very high in fat, and saturated fat.
Despite my reservations, Walmart claims that items receiving the label must be able to demonstrate compliance with rigorous nutrition criteria, adhering to the latest scientific developments as related by the US Food and Drug Administration. So perhaps it will be healthy consumers and healthy pockets for the retailer. It will be interesting to see what products will be marked with the ‘Good For You’ label. A pork pie maybe?
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