Topco Gears Up for Nutrition-Label Rollout 2008-06-23

ELLIOT ZWIEBACH

DALLAS — Five hundred retail members of Topco Associates will implement a test of a new nutrition rating system in September, with a full-scale rollout to the cooperative's 5,000 members scheduled for next spring, a former executive vice president of Topco said here last week at the inaugural Healthy Foods International Exposition and Conference.

The event was co-sponsored by SN and New Hope Natural Media, both divisions of Penton Media, New York.

Jeff Posner, who left Topco at the end of 2007 to work with the team developing the rating system, said the 500-store test will be split between retailers in two sections of the U.S., which he declined to name.

One of the companies may be Hy-Vee Food Stores, Des Moines, Iowa, whose president and chief executive officer, Ric Jurgens, is also chairman of Topco; Jurgens told SN in March he had signed up his 223 stores for the program.

Topco's 60 member companies represent 5,000 stores doing $100 billion in annual sales, Posner said.

The rating system the test stores will implement is the Overall Nutritional Quality Index, or ONQI — although it will be marketed to consumers under a brand name that Posner declined to reveal. ONQI will be based in Boston, with Nancy McDermott, a former senior vice president in Topco's TopSource division, as president, he noted.

Posner told SN it was serendipitous that Topco became ONQI's first licensee, noting that he and Dr. David Katz, who came up with the rating system, have a mutual friend who brought them together.

“It was just happenstance,” Posner said following the conference session at which he and Katz spoke. “We met in February 2007; I went to the Topco board the following month; we agreed in principle in November; and we finalized our agreement last March.”

Topco's interest in the ONQI system grew out of its interest in developing a health and wellness program that was data-based, Posner said.

The ONQI system gives consumers a single reference point for every product in the supermarket, based on ratings from 1 to 100, Katz told the session. The ratings were devised from a series of algorithms based on product ingredients, with positive attributes such as the fiber, vitamin and mineral content serving as the numerator and ingredients with more negative connotations, including saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and sugar, as the denominator.

Other information was also factored in, Katz noted — for example, overlooking the sodium content of vegetables or the sugar content of fruits. ONQI ultimately has generated data for more than 120,000 food products, he added.

“The messages on the fronts of most packages today provide an incredible amount of information, but it also makes it hard for the average consumer to tell which ones really offer the best nutrition,” Katz said.

“The scale we've developed offers a holistic microcosm of nutritional value on display at a glance, and it has the potential to change the way people eat, one item at a time.”

Katz, who is director of the Prevention Research Center at the Yale University School of Medicine, said that today 80% of adults and close to 50% of kids are overweight or obese, a statistic that suggests it's a public health issue more than the fault of individuals, he pointed out.

“But we can fix what's wrong, and we don't need any new advances in science to do it — we just need to apply the knowledge we already have to tell people how to eat better, and then make it easier for them to do so.

“Efforts to overhaul peoples' diet is slow-going, but if they could trade up every time they make a food choice, it would incrementally ratchet up the quality of the diet and people's health.

“At the present time, however, they can't do that, because there's too much conflicting information.”

Part of the problem is too much marketing, Katz pointed out. “Some breakfast cereals have more sodium content that some salty snacks; some pasta sauces have a higher sugar content than ice cream; and regular peanut butter has less sugar than reduced-fat peanut butter, but the consumer has no way of knowing that.

“So people must be empowered to make good dietary decisions, and ONQI allows them to do that.”