Teaching with Tours

I’m sure this has happened to you: a shopper has her cart full of products as she enters the checkout. She is the chatty type, so she offers information on how her husband suffers from cardiovascular disease (CVD), so she decided to ditch the big supermarket store and try the natural route. She said she wants bread that will help her husband’s heart, but you notice it’s a gluten-free variety. Sure, there is nothing wrong with this bread, but you want to suggest maybe omega-3s or CoQ10. However, there is a long line and she isn’t really asking for help anyway, so you let her on her way.

To help address this problem, maybe you could offer a bit more education to your shoppers. I came across an article last week about one supermarket in Hastings, MN, that is scheduling “grocery store tours” with a registered dietitian. The article in The Hastings Star-Gazette by Katrina Styx noted Tammi Brochman, a registered dietician and Regina Medical Center’s manager of nutrition services, will be leading free grocery store tours June 25 and June 26 at Coborn’s Superstore. These tours are designed to show shoppers how to shop heart healthy.

According to the article, Brochman will lead no more than six shoppers through the produce, deli and meat, frozen-food and packaged goods aisles. She will teach them how to choose the products that are the best for their hearts, as well as offer a run down on nutrition labels.

Some of the suggestions Brochman will offer will be to shop more frequently (good news for retailers), buy smaller amounts, and don’t overlook the frozen aisle.

I think having grocery tours are a wonderful idea, and I encourage natural product retailers to steal it, but don’t stop where Coborn’s does. Retailers can include the supplement aisles to these tours as well and focus on other areas of health, such as weight management, children’s health, bone and joint health, etc. The article noted Brochman can do virtual tours for those who are interested, but I’m sure you have enough local contacts to find an expert to do this in your store. If you don’t, it’s time to make those contacts. And, I also suggest you keep the number small, no larger than 10 people per tour. This way, everyone will be able to hear, and they can ask questions without “public speaking.”