The Green Room

Walmart unveils “Great For You” icon

By Andrea Thomas on February 7, 2012 2 comments

Andrea Thomas announces the Walmart “Great For You” seal.

I’m in Washington D.C. right now where we have just announced the culmination of something that has been years in the making: we now have a simple, front-of-pack seal to help busy families identify healthy food options.

Our customers want healthier choices, but they tell us that they absolutely don’t have time to research all of their options. People spend an average of 22 minutes in our store each visit, and they just don’t have time to wander the aisles and hunt down the most nutritious foods. They want to quickly and easily identify options that can help them build healthier lifestyles for their families.

To make healthy eating simple, we’ve created a front-of-package nutrition icon called Great For You. It will appear on produce and healthier foods, such as low fat, high protein and whole grain items with limited saturated fats, added sugars and sodium.

I’m a mom, and I know how hard it can be to keep your family on track, eating the right foods and developing a foundation for your children that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.

You’ll find the new Great For You icon on fresh fruits and vegetables and on Great Value products such as whole grain brown rice, unsweetened canned fruit and 1% milk, for example. Look for it to begin appearing on shelves this spring as it rolls out in our 3,800 U.S. stores for our 140 million customers.

This was all possible thanks to our partners. We sat down with a lot of good people to make sure this effort was informed by the very best thinking, and we really tried to do it in a transparent way – so that the results are reliable and credible.

We consulted with the FDA and USDA, with the White House under First Lady Michelle Obama’s leadership, and with numerous nutritionists, educators and leaders. Many of them stood with us this morning as we unveiled the icon, which is backed by rigorous nutrition criteria.

We are driven by a commitment to help busy moms and dads, who are not only clamoring for healthy food but for food that it is affordable and accessible.

That’s why we set bold goals a year ago to help families lead healthier lives. 

We set bold goals to help our customers lead healthier lives by committing to reducing sodium and added sugars, and removing all industrially produced trans fats. We pledged to save our customers $1 billion every year on fresh fruits and vegetables, to build stores in food deserts and to increase support for nutrition education.

So much has happened in all those areas, so every day this week, we will update you on our progress on each one of those goals with a Green Room blog post. Check back tomorrow, and thank you for joining us on this sustainability journey.