Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Hyvee, Nuval and Better Nutrition


HyVee has it going on!  I've been working at a HyVee store in Des Moines, Iowa this week.  (more on why later in the post)  HyVee was founded in 1930 in Iowa and has grown to 220 stores in the Midwest. The store is very clean, the associates are all super nice.  There's a Starbucks in the store - and the lunch food is delicious.  You've got your choice of salad bar, hot meals, Chinese, pizza -- and it's all so much better than the fast food places.  There are a lot of people that come there for lunch!  

Okay, why am I in a HyVee?  Yes, I still work my own business - this week though I was helping my husband out on a project of his.  He's doing some third party work for a company called Nuval.  

Nuval is a start up company located in Braintree, MA.  Nuval is bringing an easy to use nutritional scoring system to the market.  It's simple - based on an algorithm called Overall Nutritional Quality Index -  you can shop at any store that uses the system and make informed decisions about the products and brands you are buying.  

The range is from 1 to 100 - and the higher the number, the more nutritious the food.  For example, Post Shredded Wheat cereal is a 91 and Cap'n Crunch Crunch Berries are a 8.  

HyVee is rolling out the NuVal program as we speak.  They are still scanning in food items and getting the tags placed next to the corresponding items.  Just look around - you will see tags up already.   We worked with Anna Long and Mike Hunnewell this week - and learned much about how this company and this process is working.  Visit www.nuval.com  for all the info. 

 I'm excited!  It makes shopping a whole lot easier.  Here's hoping Nuval is coming soon to a store near you.    I'd be asking my home store manager why they aren't using Nuval! 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sure sound like something that could help us all become better informed and make better food choices. The questions comes in the cost and what it will ad to the price of the foo

Deb Brown said...

Hi Susan,
I have not noticed an added price to the cost of the food! It's really quite interesting the products you would think would be good, well, they're not so good in ranking! Thanks for the comment.