We’ve all been there: standing in the grocery
store aisle trying to pick out a box of cereal or
choose between seven kinds of blueberry yogurt.
You want something relatively healthy, but there
are so many options and they all look pretty
much the same. You could pore over each nutri-
tion panel and ingredients list or do what most
of us do: just grab one and hope for the best.
It shouldn’t be this hard to make good nutri-
tion choices. But the average American super-
market carries more than 40,000 products and
the difference between any two can be sig-
nificant. In the case of that blueberry yogurt,
one brand may contain twice the sugar of its
neighbor. Colleen Lindholz, a trained pharma-
cist who heads up all things health at Kroger,
the nation’s largest grocery chain, knew there
had to be a better way. “I saw there was a need
for someone to step in and not only talk about
what’s better for you, but to push companies
to put items on the shelf that are healthier for
you,” she says.
Lindholz is the architect of a smartphone
app that Kroger launched last October, called
OptUP. It assigns a health score to every item
in the store, whether it’s sweet potatoes (92 out
of 100), Bush’s Vegetarian Baked Beans (76)
or Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter (62). Higher-
ranked foods are lower in things like sodium,
sugar, saturated fat and calories and contain
more beneficial nutrients, such as fiber and pro-
tein. The app allows shoppers to easily scan a
food to see how it ranks, compare it to other
brands, and get suggestions of ways to “opt up”
for something healthier. “We’re not going to take
people from eating Oreos to broccoli overnight,
but maybe we can suggest a Fig Newton,” she
says. When the items go through checkout, theapp gives you a total score that quantifies how
nutritious your shopping habits have been over
time. And because it’s linked to a loyalty card,
the process is automatic—no burdensome man-
ual data input like other diet-tracking apps.
Of course, systems that rate products—such
as Guiding Stars and NuVal—have been intro-
duced before. But what makes OptUP revolution-
ary is its utter simplicity and user-friendliness. In
less than a year, more than 300,000 people have
downloaded OptUP, and early research shows
that a third of users saw their scores rise a signif-
icant 30 points over a 12-week period. More stud-
ies are in the works, including one in partnership
with the University of Cincinnati that’s examining
the impact of the app in combination with nutri-
tion advice to reduce hypertension. The goal, says
Lindholz, is to provide science to back up what
we all should know: that food truly is medicine.Supporting Better Grocery ChoicesColleen Lindholz, President, Kroger Health