Newswatch 2010-09-13 (2)

HOMELAND LAUNCHES GUIDING STARS

SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Guiding Stars, a storewide nutrition navigation system, has announced a partnership with Homeland Stores and its 73 Homeland, Country Mart and United Supermarkets locations in Oklahoma and Kansas. The Guiding Stars system uses a proprietary algorithm that factors in current guidelines and recommendations of leading national and international health organizations, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Using this algorithm, the system ranks every food item in a supermarket based on nutritional value, and translates those rankings into an easy-to-understand zero-to-three-star rating. “The health of our customers is a primary concern to us,” Darryl Fitzgerald, president and chief executive officer of Homeland Stores, said in a release. “We all need to find ways to eat healthier. A good start is by making more informed decisions, and the Guiding Stars system gives our customers basic nutritional information at the point of purchase.”

WEGMANS HOSTS BACK-TO-SCHOOL TOURS

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Wegmans Food Markets here is hosting another round of its “eat well, live well” tours for fourth-grade students. The free program, which teaches nutrition basics during class field trips, has hosted more than 200,000 kids since it was first launched in 1991. Last year alone, over 17,000 students attended, according to a company release. The tours take students through the perimeter departments — produce, dairy, bakery, meat and seafood — where they learn about healthy eating in a way that ties in with the science, geography and math lessons covered in fourth grade. In bakery departments, for example, the students sample whole-grain breads while learning that U.S. grains are grown primarily in the Midwest, that they are transported to mills to be ground into flour, and that flour and water are combined with yeast to make bread, with the yeast producing bubbles of carbon dioxide to make bread rise. “When you teach kids about how foods are made, it makes things more interesting to them and they may be more open to trying something new,” Wegmans Corporate Nutritionist Trish Kazacos said in a release. “Eating many kinds of healthful foods and being adventurous about trying new ones is one of the key messages we want to get across.”