Nutritious choices made simple®
Here at Guiding Stars, we have a lot of passion around healthy food and helping people make more nutritious choices. It is what we do. The messaging of healthy, good-for-you food to others is a team effort and we spend a lot of time focusing on getting the word out.
The 2012 FMI Health & Wellness Conference emphasized the important role that food retailers could and should play as a community based health and wellness resource for consumers. Jeremy Nobel, MD, scientific advisor to Guiding Stars, moderated a well-attended breakout session on March 20 entitled “Your Shoppers: Changing The Way We Think About Public Health By Putting Food First.”
I was on a college campus this past week, specifically in a college dining hall, watching and taking photos with my Blackberry of an exciting Guiding Stars Healthy Chef face off. It has been just a few years since I pushed my tray through the food line to see what kind of grey meat was being served or how much green had already drained out of the “green” vegetable that sat in the steaming tray for too many hours. I was curious to see up close and personal how today’s college kids were being treated at feeding time.
Guiding Stars, the first in-store nutrition navigation program, originated in 2006 at Hannaford in 167 stores. Over the past 4 ½ years, retail store growth has been steady and today the Guiding Stars program can be found in over 1600 stores in 20 states with even more locations by year end.
Guiding Stars, originally developed with grocery retailing in mind, has spread its wings and moved into other venues as well and can now be found in schools, colleges and universities, vending machines, and hospitals.
We’re excited to announce our newest Guiding Stars advisor: Registered Dietitian, Allison J. Stowell MS, RD, CDN!
As a Registered Dietitian, Allison enables individuals to make positive, sustainable changes in their eating habits by stressing conscious eating, improving relationships with food and offering a non-diet approach for reaching and maintaining ideal body weight.
When a local group, The Windham Community Garden, put together a benefit ‘Great Chili Challenge’ to raise funds for their cause, I knew we had to enter. I volunteer with another community group, the Windham Raymond Wellness Council, which strives to encourage families and kids to make healthy food choices through promoting 5210 Let’s Go! and similar efforts with support from the Lakes Region Healthy Maine Partnership.
Jack LaLanne, the “Godfather of Fitness”, recently passed away at the ripe, old age of 96. Jack was an inspiration to several generations of Americans (including me) with his energetic advocacy for fitness and good nutrition on his long running television exercise show.
LaLanne’s personal story is a fascinating one. As a young child, he was sickly and addicted to sugar. He and his mother attended a Paul Bragg seminar that changed his life. Bragg described the importance of eating correctly and exercising, and from that moment forward LaLanne was hooked.
Guiding Stars just celebrated our 4th anniversary by releasing the new search engine Food Finder into public beta. The search engine allows shoppers to search for any of 50,000 foods in the Guiding Stars database and view the zero, one, two or three star nutrition rating for that food.
Shoppers are encouraged to have conversations about food, exchange ideas and share ratings. You can write a review on a food item by logging in to the Food Finder using your email address, Facebook or Twitter account.
I recently sat down with John Eldredge, Director of Brand and Business Development at Guiding Stars to share some user questions…