As shoppers begin to realise the power of health and wellness in food buying, new opportunities are arising for retailers to deliver a superior food shopping experience to their customers.

The next wave of personalisation is about more than just convenience. It’s about better, healthier outcomes. Personalisation is about enabling healthier choices: making informed choices and understanding which foods fit into consumer lifestyle and provide the best nutrition for them.

Shifting Consumer Expectations

Consumers’ expectations are evolving and, as a result, digital health within the grocery industry has a unique opportunity to take advantage of this emerging trend. The current state of personalised recommendations is one that can be improved upon by using new innovation in technology to create experiences that better align with consumers’ individual needs.

To do so, however, requires understanding how and when consumers want information about their health or wellness products. In order for personalisation strategies to succeed across different channels (e.g., mobile devices vs desktop websites), retailers need to leverage innovative technologies and data-driven insights to deliver what consumers expect from these interactions across channels.

Retailers need to rethink their health strategy now

The crucial steps to personalised health and nutrition are accurately classifying your product catalogue based on nutrition & ingredients, identifying consumer purchase patterns and eventually matching them to each other; this will help you build an accurate understanding of what and why customers buy, how often they switch brands or types of products, and whether there are specific themes among your customers’ food choices.

Retailers have already begun the work of personalisation through product recommendations on their websites and apps. But this doesn’t go far enough for today’s consumer who increasingly sees grocery shopping not as an exercise in picking up sustenance but as an opportunity to care for themselves and their family. Beyond simply offering healthful recipes or nutritional content, retailers can provide customers with information that helps them identify specific requirements—like a food allergy or intolerance—and then curate a list of products based on those needs. It’s about catering to your shoppers’ active preferences but also predicting needs that support their future health goals. For example, on a very basic level, if a consumer shares their allergies to dairy products and prefers not to eat meat due to ethical reasons, the retailer should be able to helpaccurately  suggest alternative items like soy-based yoghurt or plant-based products.

It’s clear to us that personalised product recommendations can make grocery shopping more convenient and enjoyable for consumers. But it also makes sense from a business standpoint as people are more likely to purchase products they saw on their personalised shopping lists. We see this as an opportunity for grocers to offer customers a new way of thinking about shopping—as an opportunity not just to pick up sustenance but also as an opportunity to care for themselves and their family members by making healthier choices in-store and online.

Technology as an enabler

As we’ve seen, food has always been personal. The difference now is that technology can take it to an unprecedented level of accuracy and detail, so you can get the perfect nutrition for your body—all day, every day. We’re excited about the possibilities this could unlock for people who are looking to improve their health by making changes in their diet. Equally, we are also looking forward to seeing how retailers are enabling this health-driven future and building their strategies to help their shoppers make healthier choices that last.