Making Healthy Choices Easy Choices With Help From Walmart
Posted by Josh Wachs on Tuesday, February 7, 2012
This week, the Walmart Foundation announced a $4 million grant to Share Our Strength for our Cooking Matters program and its new initiative, Shopping Matters. These programs are key strategies in our No Kid Hungry Campaign, which works to increase access to public food and nutrition programs and educate families on how to get more from their food resources. Walmart’s generous support will allow us to expand the program to help many more families across the country.
Balancing health, affordability and practicality is our focus. We strive to meet people where they are, and provide healthy eating solutions that are realistic in their lives. One of the reasons we partner with Walmart is because it’s where many of our participants grocery shop. In our recent survey, It’s Dinnertime: A Report on Low-Income Families’ Efforts to Plan, Shop for, and Cook Healthy Meal, we found that 89% of low- and middle- income families shop at a retailer like Walmart at least once a month. Another reason that we partner with Walmart is that, we believe, like the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign, that Walmart has shown real leadership in making healthy choices simpler and more affordable for Americans on a limited budget.
Today, I was pleased to participate on a panel discussion hosted by Walmart focused on how to help Americans live healthier lives. There’s clearly a willing audience for healthier foods: It’s Dinnertime shows that 85% of low-income families view healthy eating as important, but only half report being able to get a healthy dinner on the table most nights a week. So the question of the day was: how can we help make eating healthy an everyday activity?
One thing we hear regularly in our Cooking Matters courses is that the information out there can be really confusing. Walmart’s new front of package food icon recognizes that busy parents need tools to help them recognize healthful items. We’re also pleased to see Walmart’s progress on reducing or eliminating the price premium on “better-for-you” items, such as whole grain and reduced sodium products, since 25% of families said they skip healthy purchases at the store because of cost. That means that access to healthy and affordable foods needs to be a priority. As many of us have heard through its partnership with the Let’s Move campaign, Walmart is expanding stores in “food deserts” across the U.S. This has been the subject of some discussion recently, in the wake of our survey’s findings that the majority of low-income families are satisfied with their ability to access a grocery store with healthy items. But a family that may be able to get to a store that sells healthy foods isn’t necessarily able to afford those items. More than 60% of the families we surveyed are satisfied with the variety and quality of healthy groceries, but less than one-third are satisfied with their cost. The work that Walmart and others are doing to address food deserts is focused on bringing affordable healthy foods to those areas, and our survey reflects that there’s a significant need for more low-cost options.
Better access to affordable healthy foods is an important step, but it goes hand-in-hand with education. Practical education, especially around meal planning and food budgeting can help low-income families get healthy meals on the table more often. That’s the work our volunteers do every day in Cooking Matters courses and Shopping Matters tours across the country, and we’re proud to call Walmart a partner in that effort.
Learn more about Cooking Matters and Shopping Matters.
February 7, 2012 | 0 comment(s) | Tags: cooking matters, walmart
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