Help Shoppers Meal Plan
For many, food is best when it comes with convenience.
With long days and lots of activity, many consumers rely heavily on convenience for quick meals, which doesn’t always equate to a healthy serving of fruits and vegetables. In fact, Produce for Better Health reported that, “regardless of where it was sourced, fruit and vegetable consumption has been on the decline since 2009, especially for home prepared vegetables.”
But why? Time constraints tend to play a large role. Many people barely have enough time to cook a meal at night not to mention meal plan for the entire week, which means the ease of stopping by a drive-thru that results in half the time and half the cost can be much more convenient.
As a retail dietitian, how do you talk with your consumers and clients to better help them understand that healthy meal planning and convenience can go hand-in-hand with fresh produce?
Take the advice of RDBA sponsor Stemilt Growers, a family-owned supplier of apples, pears, cherries and summer fruits based in Wenatchee, WA, and lean on your produce department’s suppliers for recipes and other resources that you can share with shoppers in order to get more plates filled with the half the plate fruit and vegetable recommendation.
Share week-day meal plans like this one from Stemilt with shoppers and educate them on using a weekend day as their primary prep day. You could create a meal plan challenge for willing shoppers to submit their best healthy meal plan for a chance to win a week’s worth of groceries. Or, create your own plan and distribute it during store tours or one-on-one shopper interactions. It’s a great way to brand yourself as the go-to resource on health for your supermarket.
Get more resources like this by joining Crunch Circle, a monthly eNewsletter written just for dietitians from Stemilt. It offers recipes, nutrition, and health information, social media tools, and much more in order to help you plan for successful outreach on apples, pears, cherries, and summer fruits. Subscribe today.
