Hristina Nikolova

Healthy Choice: The Effect of Simplified Point-of-Sale Nutritional Information on Consumer Food Choice Behavior

Grocery retailers are joining the fray against obesity by offering a wide range of health and wellness programs at the point of sale. However, the success of such programs in promoting healthy choices remains an open question. The authors examine the effectiveness of a growing health and wellness initiative: a simplified nutrition scoring system. They present a conceptual framework that predicts the effect of such a scoring system on shoppers’ food decisions and their sensitivity to price and promotion, as well as the moderating influence of category-level factors. Using a large-scale quasi experiment and panel data across eight product categories for more than 535,000 members of a grocery chains frequent shopper program, the authors demonstrate that the point-of-sale nutrition scoring system helped consumers make healthier food choices, such that they switched to higher-scoring products in the postrollout period. The results also reveal that shoppers became less price sensitive and more promotion sensitive following the introduction of the food scoring system. The authors discuss implications for research and practice.

The Shopper-Centric Retailer: Three Case Studies on Deriving Shopper Insights from Frequent Shopper Data

Abstract In the age of “big data,” one of the most important capabilities that differentiates the winners from the losers in the intensely competitive grocery market is how successfully a firm can harness its vast amounts of shopper data to become more shopper-centric. Grocery retailers struggle with how to manage the tremendous amount of data available to them and best leverage their frequent shopper data to derive insights. These data also present an opportunity for academic research on decision-making and evaluation of strategic initiatives. This chapter discusses three case studies that illustrate the various capabilities of frequent shopper data in generating shopper insights. Specifically, using frequent shopper data for millions of shoppers, the three case studies demonstrate how frequent shopper data can be used as an important information asset for understanding differences and similarities among different shopper groups (Case Study 1), as a means to assess the effectiveness of store redesigns/environment changes (Case Study 2), and as a key tool for evaluating program success (Case Study 3). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how successful collaboration between practitioners and academics can be a boon to both business success and academic research.