Hannaford's nutritional rating shifts buying habits
Hannaford Supermarkets’ nutritional rating system, which uses gold stars attached to price labels, is changing consumer buying habits, a new independent study found.
The Guiding Stars system is potentially another tool to educate consumers on eating healthier, according to a story by The Associated Press.
The study suggested the gold stars helped steer shoppers away from items with no stars and toward healthier foods that merited gold stars.
"Our results suggest that point-of-sale nutrition information programs may be effective in providing easy-to-find nutrition information that is otherwise nonexistent, difficult to obtain or difficult to understand," the researchers wrote in the study, published last week in the journal Food Policy.
The Guiding Stars was started in 2006, and is now licensed for use in more than 1,800 Hannaford supermarkets in the United States and Canada.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the University of Florida focused on the cereal aisle, comparing data from 134 Hannaford stores in the Northeast against an equal number of similar stores. They found that sales of no-star cereals dropped 2.58% more at Hannaford stores compared with the control group.
"Although the percentages are small, if you think in terms of the actual quantities or boxes of cereal sold in the national market, this could have some important implications on the nation's health," Jordan Lin, an author of the study and scientist at the FDA, told the AP.
Julie Greene, healthy living manager at Hannaford, told the wire service there was less pushback against Guiding Stars than expected from food manufacturers, who she said are reformulating their products to become healthier.
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