AUSTIN, Texas -- Keying on National Snack Food Month and the Winter Olympics, Whole Foods Market has expanded its annual Super Bowl snack promotion into a month-long event, themed "The Gold Medal Game Plan."
The promotion involves in-store, point-of-purchase materials and Web site information, along with a public relations effort promoting natural recipes and snack tips, said Kate Lowery, spokeswoman.
"We are dialing up with National Snack Food Month, combining it with two obvious snack-and-food consumption times. We thought this promotion was a natural fit," she said.
The promotion started in late January and will continue through this month.
The effort is not focused on increasing sales and is primarily educational, she said. "We want to remind our consumers that there are alternatives to traditional snacks." These include "grab-and-go" snacks from the retailer's grocery aisles, and recipes such as "Quick n' Spicy Tamari Nut Mix" and "In the Zone Quesadillas."
"It's not a typical promotion for us," Lowery said. "It's more of an awareness campaign to get people to evaluate their current snack regimen and make sure they have the right game plan for this year."
The recipes and tips are by Whole Foods' snack "coach" Alana Sugar, who noted that balanced and frequent snacking can be a healthy way to eat. "Typically, snacks have not often been associated with good nutrition because of the amount of saturated fats, high-caloric content and artificial additives they contain," she said.
"These days, you can find great-tasting snacks free of all these unwanted ingredients and the guilt."
This information is available on the retailer's Web site, a practice that Whole Foods has been doing more of in the past year when it conducts outreach campaigns or educational awareness programs, Lowery said. "We will put content on our Web site to complement what we are doing," she said.
