InteliChoice Lends Helping Hand for Making Healthy Choices
In a bid to assist help retailers enhance their wellness initiatives, InteliChoice, a web-based health and wellness merchandising system, has a new tool to help guide shoppers to the most appropriate food choices for their personal goals or specific nutrition needs.
“Research is showing that shoppers make decisions in two to three seconds at the shelf,” says Judy Seybold, VP of InteliChoice and a registered dietitian. “We supply retailers with a finished end product so that they can easily communicate to the consumer where the wiser choices are. It’s not about good or bad judgments, it’s about transparency. It’s letting shoppers shop toward their personal goals.”
InteliChoice takes a retailer’s master list of products and provides regulatory, nutrition and IT expertise to synthesize attributes, allowing consumers to make lists before visiting the store or shop smarter at the shelf. Consumers are able to shop by allergen and ingredient attributes (such as whole grain, no egg, organic) as well as nutrient based attributes (such as heart healthy, good source of protein, calorie count), across all 98 or selected categories. “It creates a personal experience for the shopper,” says Seybold, because they are able to make choices based on attributes most relevant to them and their families.
A retailer client provides InteliChoice access to its inventory master list, which is tracked in real time. InteliChoice works with retailers to develop and market wellness programs based on what the retailer has in stock, including private label offerings. Further, InteliChoice can provide retailers with different programs each month, such as heart health one month and calorie counts the next month. These programs come with ideas on executing end-aisle displays or custom-sign packages. “Our goal is to keep the shelf-edge fresh, current and on trend,” says Seybold.
A Healthy Package
Newark, Del.-based Foxfire Printing, InteliChoice’s parent company, is a single-source integration solutions provider of printing, shelf-edge marketing, data management and fulfillment. The company has produced InteliChoice merchandising kits that include in-store signage, InteliChoice attribute tags, and recipe cards, among other media. Programs also include social marketing tools and marketing content support, the latter in the form monthly articles on an attribute or around a theme, such as school lunches or whole grain, which can be used on a retailer’s website, distributed through social media, or as a print ad.
Launched late last year, InteliChoice is currently in more than 1,000 stores nationwide, with more stores being on boarded. “Because of our team of expert nutritionists who touch and review every UPC, we’re really RD (registered dietitian) preferred,” says Seybold. InteliChoice makes it possible for RDs, or any in-store personnel, to parse everything in store by as many attributes as needed, and use it as a supporting document for customer assistance, developing a class or marketing program. Not only are consumers able to make better-informed choices for themselves, but store associates continuously develop their own health and wellness expertise as they learn more about product attributes and what resonates most with customers.