Change on Safeway's agenda

PLEASANTON, Calif. Safeway plans to launch an online tool that will allow loyalty cardholders to view the nutritional content of past purchases, the company said last week.

Foodflex, an innovative online nutrition tool available exclusively to Safeway Club Card members, provides personalized food and nutrition information and offers alternative food choices, the company said in a statement. The program allows a household to quickly and easily view their grocery purchases, benchmark their performance against USDA guidelines, identify healthier food alternatives in specific grocery categories and create a personalized shopping list to achieve their nutritional goals. 

“Foodflex helps them take a look at the foods they bring home for their families and make changes as they are necessary,” Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said in a recent interview with Supermarket News. “If you’re trying to cut your sodium, for instance, you can learn through Foodflex how much sodium what you’re normally eating contains and adjust it by taking the suggestions Foodflex offers. No one else is doing anything like this.”

The launch of Foodflex, planned for January, will be supported in stores, online and through the company’s circulars.

Meanwhile, Supermarket News reported that Safeway’s cfo has reiterated that the company would consider developing new formats once it has completed upgrading its store base to the Lifestyle concept over the next two years.

“If there is profit in a small-format vehicle, we could easily duplicate it, though it would be a challenge to make a small box work, so the jury is still out on that,” cfo Robert Edwards said at the Morgan Stanley Global Consumer & Retail Conference.

When asked for his opinion on Tesco’s Fresh & Easy stores, Edwards said, “Our early read is, it looks more like a price vehicle than a fresh vehicle.”