Evolving Shopping Experiences for the Health-Conscious Consumer
Consumers are reimagining their relationship with their food, pushing retailers to innovate beyond the traditional shopping experiences. This shift isn’t just a trend – it’s a structural change in how consumers approach nutrition and how retailers must respond to maintain their trust and relevance.
Post-pandemic, health-and-wellness consciousness has reached new heights. According to a Tebra study, one in four Americans plans to use GLP-1 weight loss medication in 2025, with GenZ leading the charge, at 35%. Food is consumers’ primary tool for managing health, and 76% of Americans are willing to put at least some effort into selecting nutritious and healthy options. In particular, households with kids (43% of American households had at least one member under 18 in them) feel they have a lot more room to eat healthfully. However, industry surveys reveal a growing frustration among shoppers, as they have to spend considerable time finding the right options for their families.
The Trust Crisis in Nutritional Claims
The initial wave of health-conscious consumerism in 2022 sparked a proliferation of nutrition claims on packaging by manufacturers. While that helped consumers in the short term, it has led to an unexpected consequence: widespread skepticism. Social media platforms, especially TikTok, have been influential in exposing the limitations of single-claim marketing. Consumers discovered that their favorite protein and granola bars, which boast of health benefits on the packaging, actually contain massive amounts of sugar and have a high glycemic index. It’s a similar story with the long-adopted oatmilk. This has caused consumers to grow distrustful of single-claim marketing and made it harder for them to find clean, good-for-you products.
[RELATED: Consumers Hone In on Ingredients in Quest for Transparency]
News stories about misleading advertising, unethical practices and data privacy concerns have further deepened that consumer sentiment. Today’s consumers, especially younger generations, demand comprehensive nutritional transparency. They're looking beyond individual claims to understand:
- Complete nutritional profiles, including macro- and micronutrients
- Blood sugar impact
- Artificial ingredient content
- Overall health implications
The importance of social consumer reviews, review platforms and certified testimonials has grown in recent years to satisfy this consumer need.
While grocery shoppers continue to take responsibility for their health and nutrition, they are increasingly expecting accountability from retailers. This is the moment for retailers to step up for their consumers and gain trust when shoppers are skeptical of everything around them. Kroger's OptUP nutrition scoring system demonstrates the industry's recognition of this need. However, systems like this are proprietary and, while valuable, don't fully address the consumer's desire for independent verification.
The Path Forward: Digital Integration of Nutritional Transparency
There’s an opportunity for retailers to win customer trust while also increasing sales by partnering with food transparency sites to easily display the score of the item. Yuka is a popular food information and rating app that highlights the good and bad nutritional aspects of the product and assigns it a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the healthiest. Yuka has been No. 1 on the Apple App Store’s list of health and fitness apps, with 14 million users in the United States as of August 2024 and 20,000 more joining daily.
Several other independent databases like this exist now, such as Open Food Facts, Sift Food Labels and Foodscape, that can be leveraged to provide holistic impact to the customer. Retailers would need to implement such a database in four steps:
- Connect to the database with an API
- Include “health scores” as item attributes in the catalog
- Enhance online filtering capabilities to include the health score attribute
- Recommend personalized recommendations to customers, based on their health score preferences
In-store, retailers have an opportunity to implement digital shelf labels with health scores. Retailers that wish to lean further into the nutrition-based model may even consider changing the store layout to make it easier for customers to find healthy options and could integrate health scores into their loyalty programs to reward nutritious choices. At the very least, stores could incorporate the scores in their in-store app experience so customers may find healthy options easily.
One would expect manufacturers to also leverage Yuka or other health app scores for marketing claims purposes, but since retailers are considered an impartial party, their use of this strategy is more likely to be trusted by consumers.
Looking Ahead
The emergence of nutrition-based shopping behavior signals a lasting shift in consumer priorities as the younger generation thinks about its health, wellness, self-confidence and longevity. These shoppers’ demand for transparency creates a clear mandate for retailers: Evolve from traditional merchant relationships to become trusted wellness partners. Those that embrace this change will not only survive, but also thrive, in the new era of conscious consumption.
