Healthier Choices

HEALTHIER CHOICES Our policy

We aim to make healthier eating commonplace. By making fresh, nutritious and delicious food available and affordable for everyone, we contribute to healthier communities. Our strong local brands and their broad ranges of products offer fresh inspiration every day. With an assortment that includes affordable nutritious choices, and with recipes, support services and transparent labelling, our brands are making healthier eating easier. With engaging activities, we are making healthier and more sustainable food appealing and fun. We strive to provide healthier and more sustainable choices and guidance to our customers while at the same time offering the wide range of products consumers demand.

Our brands work to help make customers and associates more aware of what they eat and how it impacts their health and the planet. They inspire customers and provide healthier food in stores and online. They continue to add healthier and more sustainable products to their assortments and keep reformulating own-brand products to reduce salt, sugar and fat and increase vitamins, whole grains and fiber.

Our brands continue to drive transparency about nutritional value through Nutri-Score in Europe and Guiding Stars in the U.S.

HEALTHIER CHOICES How we put it into action

Through its Super Plus program, our Delhaize brand in Belgium integrated healthier choices into its customer loyalty program. Super Plus gives customers additional discounts for products that receive a healthy score in the nutritional navigation system, Nutri-Score. More than two million customers have already signed up for the program.

Another example is Mega Image, which this year continued encouraging a healthy lifestyle among the younger generations by kicking off the third edition of its “I Eat Properly, I’m Mega Healthy” program. Developed in collaboration with doctors and nutritionists, the program provides children with interactive education sessions to help them better understand what a healthy plate should include and how a balanced diet contributes to a healthy lifestyle.

In Greece, Alfa Beta launched a new service, “Your personal dietician is here for you,” as part of its Health & Wellness Hub. It provides personalized online meal plans based on the Mediterranean diet with special tips for functional needs. Customers can purchase the products for their meal plans with one click through the AB Eshop and are rewarded for their healthy choices with AB Plus coupons.

Stop & Shop offers access to licensed registered dietitians – for free. Customers can connect with them to get advice on eating healthy on a budget, losing weight planning meals and much more.

Albert Heijn has reformulated many own-brand products in the last couple of years to make healthy choices easier. For example, the brand cut out the equivalent of 117 million sugar cubes by reformulating own-brand products like popcorn, nut bars and muesli nuts. At the same time, Albert Heijn reduced the use of salt by more than 52 thousand kg by optimizing own-brand products such as cheese spread and salsa and removed over 282 thousand kg of saturated fats from products like AH American pancakes and coffee bread.

In order to facilitate the shift towards healthy and sustainable diets, our brands are growing their plant-based assortments and inspiring customers with vegetarian and vegan recipes. For example, Giant Food has expanded the plant-based products under its Nature’s Promise own brand and added several external brands to its assortment, such as Beyond Meat, Planet Oat and Plant Junkie. 

Our targets are to have over 52.3% healthy own-brand food sales as a proportion of total own-brand food sales by 2025. The healthy sales standards we use follow the Nutri-Score and Choices criteria (2018 – 2020) for our European brands and Guiding Stars ratings for the U.S. brands.

HEALTHIER CHOICES How we enable healthier eating

HEALTHIER CHOICES Data on our performance