When distributors move out of their stores

Last June the 26^th, I drew your attention to the "Guiding Stars" of the Hannaford supermarket chain in the U.S.: having established a nutritional assessment grid with a group of scientists from 6 universities (Harvard, Tufts, California-Davis, Southern Maine, Dartmouth School of Medicine, North Carolina), Hannaford awarded "star-points" to all the food products sold in its stores. Only 23% of them were entitled to one star or more! They saw their sales of starred products increase 3 to 4 times faster than products that had no stars.

 Since then, the "Guiding Stars" system has been extended to all Delhaize subsidiaries in the U.S. (165 Hannaford, 1177 Food Lion and 108 Sweetbay Supermarket) – that is, to the entire eastern region of the country.

Guiding Stars Licensing C° has just been created to sell this system outside these market brands. Indeed, they have just announced that they would market it outside of food brands: their potential customers will be found amongst national brands, restaurants, schools, hospitals and convenience stores.

So here is a distributor with the ambition to make its nutritional evaluation system a national benchmark: no matter how much time it will take to achieve it, Hannaford and the Delhaize group have just proven that they are reinventing their profession of selectors and that, taking into account the expectations in matters of public health, they intend to become THE reference in the matter. Bravo!