Articles

If you’re approaching the New Year with thoughts on how to take your retail career to a new level, assess your current effectiveness in managing upward. Establishing positive relationships with your boss as well as your company’s executives and senior leadership, showcasing your work and how it impacts the business, and learning more about where you can have the greatest impact can lead to increased responsibility, influence, and career success.

Last week, we shared some insights from Judy Dodd, MS, RD, LDN, FADA, who has been the Healthy Living Advisory for Giant Eagle for 20 years. Today, we’re going to continue the conversation with Judy, focusing on retail dietitian hiring practices and key attributes for retailers to consider when hiring dietitians.

In the coming weeks, RDBA will be launching a career center on our website, www.retaildietitians.com. In the interim, we will be posting job opportunities in RDBA Weekly to help get the word out. If you have a retail dietitian job posting that you would like for us to share, please email allison@retaildietitians.com. Take a look at the following opportunity from ShopRite.

Retailers that support the well-being of workers, suppliers and customers earn loyalty by making lives better.

You’re a dietitian. What can you possibly learn from a marketer? Quite a bit, if you work for a retailer. Getting outside of the “nutrition box” is one of the biggest challenges faced by retail dietitians, especially if you’re new to the industry. When I was working for the Central Market Division of the H.E.B. Grocery Company, my most important mentors were those in operations and, yes, marketing.

RDBA Weekly has been a work-in-progress for nearly 12 months! We’re excited to finally launch and welcome our readers to what we hope will be one of your favorite things about Monday.

Registered dietitians (RD) bring expertise in nutrition, behavior change, and consumer education to the retail space. They’re a trusted and authoritative voice in traditional and social media as well as with consumers, colleagues and grocery employees. Food manufacturers look to RDs as an important partner.

There has never been a better time to be a registered dietitian (RD), both in terms of positive impact on public health and professional opportunities. But... it's up to the RD to make the biggest impact possible. Here are some tips to help retail RDs lead the way, developing relationships that will build store loyalty while moving the needle on public health.

Over the past 10 years, there has been a significant increase in registered dietitians working for retailers. Judy Dodd, MS, RD, LDN, FADA, has been the Healthy Living Advisory for Giant Eagle for 20 years and is a member of the Retail Dietitians Business Alliance (RDBA) Advisory Board. We asked Judy a few questions to help shed some light on the retail registered dietitian (RD) landscape—where it’s been and where it is today.

Last year we predicted how weather conditions around the globe would affect crop yields and impact food production and prices; little did we know just how big that impact would be. 2012 brought us the worst drought in 50 years, and created havoc on over 60% of all farmland here in the United States. There is little doubt that, just as the USDA has predicted, food prices will continue to rise for many years to come. The average American spends less than nine percent of their income on food, which is the lowest percentage of citizens of any other country, and less than Americans spent back in 1982 (13 percent). Yet even modest food price increases will affect many.