Introducing Shopping Matters®, a New Grocery Store Tour Focused on Health and Savings
Posted by Gregory Silverman on Monday, October 3, 2011
How do you feel walking into a supermarket? Inspired? Overwhelmed? For most people, grocery shopping is a daunting task. For parents trying to feed their families on limited budgets, it’s especially difficult. What’s on sale? What foods will my kids actually eat? How do I get both quality and quantity?
We know these questions well. We hear them all the time from Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters™ participants when our volunteers take them to a grocery store (week five of our signature six-week adults course always includes this field trip).
That’s why we designed Shopping Matters®, a free, hands-on guided grocery store tour that grew out of our week five field trip. Shopping Matters helps families make smarter food choices in the store and get more nutritional bang for their buck.
It’s a different model than Cooking Matters – a stand-alone tour that lasts about an hour, rather than a series of classes over multiple weeks. Cooking Matters courses are in 25 states (and growing!), but Shopping Matters tours can take place anywhere in the country.
Here’s how it works: Share Our Strength gives local facilitators – typically culinary experts, nutrition professionals, or health educators - the tools they to run tours in their community. These tour facilitators then find a local grocery store to host the tour, recruit participants, and plan and lead the tour. Participants walk away with the skills to maximize their food resources in a healthy, delicious way.
Shopping Matters covers important shopping strategies like identifying whole grains, comparing unit prices, reading the Nutrition Facts Panel, and shopping with a plan and budget. Tours are geared towards parents and caregivers on a limited budget, and one tour focuses specifically on foods available in the WIC food package.
Shopping Matters has been piloted across the country. So far, tour participants have had great feedback about the tours. Participants learned “that trying new things will be good for me and my children,” “when to buy throughout the year to get cheaper prices,” and “no matter if you purchase fresh, frozen, or canned veggies or fruit, not one is better than the other. The important thing is to eat fruit and veggies.”
We’re grateful to Walmart for its generous support of Shopping Matters, which is allowing us to bring tours to more communities across the country. The ConAgra Foods® Foundation was instrumental in the development of this exciting new tool. Both are national sponsors of Cooking Matters and share our commitment to teaching low-income families how to plan and prepare healthy, affordable meals.
You’ll see more about Shopping Matters in the coming weeks. Check us out on Twitter and Facebook — we’ll be sharing stories, photos, videos, and shopping tips to raise awareness of this new tool and recruit strong community leaders to lead tours in their local supermarkets. We’d love to hear from you! Share your stories on our wall about shopping for healthy foods on a budget, and let us know your tips!
You can help bring Shopping Matters to your community. Click here to find out how.
October 3, 2011 | 0 comment(s) | Tags: cooking matters, shopping matters
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