RESOURCES
- Visit the GreenChoice website greenchoicenow.com
- Install the GreenChoice App about.greenchoicenow.com/food-scanner-app
- Follow GreenChoice on Instagram
- Follow Galen on Instagram
- Follow GreenChoice on LinkedIn
- Follow Galen on LinkedIn
- Follow GreenChoice on TikTok
- Follow Galen on TikTok
- Watch this episode on YouTube
- Listen to this episode on iTunes
On this podcast, we are going to learn how to make better grocery shopping decisions using technology; unless you are a grocery store owner… in which case you can use the same app to choose better products for your store. Our guest, Galen Karlan-Mason, is the CEO and Founder of GreenChoice, found at greenchoice.co, a food intelligence company dedicated to making transparent, evidence-based nutrition and sustainability data accessible to both retailers and shoppers. There is a GreenChoice app you can download and have with you at all times on your phone.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro Snip
00:59 Introduce Galen Karlan, CEO of GreenChoice
03:18 What is the inspiration behind the GreenChoice app?
09:05 What is GreenChoice and what is the benefit to the shoppers and store owners?
09:48 How does GreenChoice make money?
12:39 Where does the data come from and how do you prevent people from gaming the data?
15:48 Is the data “open source” or crowd sourced? Where does the food green score come from?
20:55 Dr. Haley’s update demonstrating the app working which did not work properly during the interview
23:19 Does the app index products that are direct to consumer and not available in stores?
25:57 What is the benefit of GreenChoice over other apps?
28:35 What is the target market?
31:08 What is an example of a food type and the variability of scores in that category?
33:12 Can I program the app to not show me foods with added sugar?
36:25 What is ultra processed foods?
38:28 What did you learn in your analysis of the top 20 retailers in the United States?
41:27 What is the range of scores for frozen pizzas?
42:57 What is our role in determining what foods are available for purchase?
43:43 What is the best place to get the app and find out more?
TRANSCRIPT
the app was simple. In essence, it’s you scan a food, you see an evidence based food, health score. It’s 1 to 100 color coded traffic light style. So green, yellow, orange, red. And then we show you swaps. So you’re looking at chips and maybe the source is Not so good. What alternative options in that store. Other chips can you get that are a bit better for you?
You are listening to the Dr. Haley Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you optimize your health. Each episode there will be an interview or a message to help you discover better health. We will be featuring health radicals on the show to bring new ideas to the table, as well as doubling down on key fundamentals to support you living your best life.
Your host is no other than the founder of Haley Nutrition Dr. Michael Haley.
This is the Dr. Haley Show podcast. I’m Dr. Michael Haley, your show host. And today we’re going to learn how to make better grocery shopping decisions. Unless you own a grocery store, then you’re going to learn how to choose products for your store. Our guest, Galen Karlan-Mason, is the CEO and founder of Green Choice, found at greenchoice.co a food intelligence company dedicated to making transparent, evidence based nutrition and sustainability data accessible to both retailers and shoppers.
There’s a Green Choice app you can download and have with you at all times on your phone. Galen, welcome to the, podcast.
I’m wondering for someone that’s listening to this because
I really want to dig into the app a little bit. Does it make sense? Unless they’re driving, of course, to actually download the app right now and maybe see some of the things we might be talking about as we go through that?
Yeah, absolutely. And
first, Michael, thanks for having me to have this important conversation. The time is
certainly now
to be thinking about what’s in our food
and the choices we’re making. So yeah, I would say absolutely.
If you’re not driving,
check out
the green choice app. It’s available on Android, iOS. It’s totally free to use.
It’s not how we monetize as a business,
is our gift to
the world. We believe this information should be accessible.
We’re gonna dig in deep, including and how you monetize the business, because I want to understand how everything works
and what the benefit to it is, not just our benefit, which is obvious.
And admittedly, I only downloaded the app yesterday for the first time, and you actually had a really brilliant, I’ll call it marketing genius step built into it. And that was to unlock some of the features. I had to actually share the app with someone. So I guess with the family member and
it so it’s kind of like, okay,
that’s my payment for using the app, but really I’m just blessing someone else by turning them onto something that’s really cool.
Yeah. What inspired you to create this green Choice app?
So Green Choice began
a little over six years ago. I was a graduate student in Boston and struggling to
navigate the grocery store. I grew up with multiple food allergies, but they’ve changed over the years. I have an almond allergy and a hazelnut allergy that will,
trigger anaphylaxis so they can kill me, oh man. And I was also a two sport college athlete, so I had this relationship to food as fuel.
But as a grad student, I wasn’t playing sports anymore. I’m grocery shopping consistently for myself for the first time. And I go into the grocery store and I’m trying to make healthier choices. I’ve got to read every ingredient list to make sure it won’t kill me because of these allergies
or give me a reaction. And it was just exhausting and,
as I’m trying to make these choices, I’m digging in.
I’m googling questions about ingredients as like, I want to make healthful choices for myself. And each answer I found would just only lead to more questions. And I should note that I grew up in a little town in Vermont. I kind of to former hippies as parents. My dad was an environmental science professor, my mom was a therapist, and my mom really was mindful of this idea of food as medicine.
Long before that was a buzzword and very, very strict, quite frankly, about what we could have in the house. What
food she was buying and she was intentional about not having lots of added sugars, having artificial food coloring
and ingredients in our foods. And at that time, I hated it. Candidly, I wanted like I couldn’t wait to get over to a friend’s house and chow down on some Froot Loops.
But in hindsight, I was
so, so fortunate. I was so fortunate and, you know, fast forward, you know, a couple of decades later, I’m in that grocery store with that upbringing, and I’m still struggling. I’m still overwhelmed, even with
the consciousness and the knowledge that my parents had tried to pass on. Even
as a graduate student, I couldn’t navigate it.
and I looked around and I started talking to other people and found this was a
common challenge. And I also grew up surrounded by chronic illness in my family, amongst my friends, obesity, a mix
of chronic health issues and could see that the way that we are eating is making us sicker.
Often. And yet food also has the power to make us better. And I, in my own journey, I’ve been able to overcome different food allergies with the help of a naturopathic doctor and
really felt that firsthand. So that’s really all those pieces came together, and it was the catalyst
to say, hey, the data is out there, the information is out there, but it’s got to be easy to use.
It’s got to be accessible to us when we’re making these decisions, and we’re rushed and we’re trying to get in and out of the store, and we got a kid who’s screaming and, you know, all the
factors of life that make these decisions so difficult. And so we built the app and
the app was simple.
In essence, it’s you scan a food, you see an evidence based food, health score. It’s 1 to 100 color coded traffic light style. So green, yellow, orange, red. And then we show you swaps. So you’re looking at chips and maybe the source is Not so good. What alternative options in that store. Other chips can you get that are a bit better for you?
And then we went one step further because we understand that this is a push to hang on a second. Did you say in that store, is it tied to a specific store when you’re actually shopping? So the app today
is not. But the first version at that time was and we’ve gone on an evolution. We, we might talk about that today, but at that time it was tied to a specific store.
And then we’d ask you what your dietary preferences were, and you could plug in 70 plus different allergens. Nutrient. You know, you need high protein. You want low sodium, you want no artificial,
additives. The list goes on. You could set those preferences and have it all personalized to you.
did you say those preferences are put into the app?
So any time I turn it on, it remembers those. Don’t show me anything with, yes, nuts in it or whatever. Exactly.
Okay, that is cool. So you get to build your profile. I like it,
You know, I want to go back to something else. You said, what were your two sports?
My primary sport was soccer. Soccer has always been
my love. And
I also ended up walking onto the track team. I learned my senior year in high school that I was
decently fast. And so,
I sprinted as well, probably from all the sprint work on the soccer field. I’m guessing. Yeah. Just totally. Yeah.
Soccer is a workout. Okay. I was thinking, you know, Vermont. I was thinking, okay, we probably got snowboarding and, you know, mountain bike, I don’t know, I love to snowboard. Yeah, but there was no team for that. It wasn’t no team for it. Right? X games. Just the X games.
Okay, back to the. app
when was the app initially built and where do you see it is currently
in the
development phase.
And what do you see coming. Yeah. So.
Might be worth stepping back for a second to just explain to the audience exactly what green choice does and how the app fits into that.
And from there we can talk about what’s next.
So
Green Choice is a food, health and sustainability intelligence company for the grocery industry. So what that means is we analyze foods, dietary
health impacts, and we work with grocery stores, wholesalers and different partners that work with those
retailers and wholesalers to help their shoppers easily identify foods that meet your dietary needs and health goals.
Using our data and our software. And while we started with
the app I just described and that is
what is available to all of our listeners today to download for free and use. While we started there, the company has grown into something much more, which is a partner to the retailers to embed this kind of experience into their own apps, into their websites, into their store shopping environments.
So you don’t even need to use the Green Choice app. You can go into one of our partner stores and be able to see our food green scores on the shelf, and scan a QR to learn more. Or you can see those scores and personalized recommendations in your grocery stores app, and be able to filter and build your own dietary profile.
So we are now really a data company helping move the industry to a more transparent, personalized place. So. And is that maybe how it’s monetized? And possibly the grocery stores are exactly, Exactly. We license our data to partners. We also work in the health care space. So we’re working with more and more food as medicine partners and health care providers who see food really as what it is, which is, you know, the most impactful,
tool that we have
to really dictate our health and prevent chronic illness.
And so, you know, more and more in the US, we have payers willing to actually fund OTC cards or healthy benefit cards that you can use, much like you would if you had a snap benefit you can use at the grocery store to buy healthful foods, but they need data on what foods you should be able to get, and so we support that.
It’s happening now. Wow. I think that’s great because, you know, yeah, personally, I think if you have,
assistance on, you know, getting nutrition that you should make sure you’re getting real nutrition. I think that would be great.
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where does the data come from and how do you prevent.
People influencing the data and their own product scores. Yeah. This is a really important question for us.
there’s a few pieces to this answer. The first is
when I started the business I made the conscious decision. Despite recommendations
not to from our legal counsel,
to incorporate the business as a public benefit company,
which means that we have a different
responsibility than your average company.
We have a fiduciary responsibility to improve shareholder value, to increase shareholder value, meaning maximize profits, if you will. We also have a fiduciary responsibility to achieve and maintain our public benefit. And so you define that when you start the company. And for us that was fostering a healthier, more sustainable world through our daily purchases and food choices. And that means that myself and our leadership team have a responsibility to make sure that increasing shareholder value never comes at the expense of that public benefit.
And that was really core because we knew that we were stepping into a space where there was going to be a lot of companies that had an interest in skewing our work, trying to
manipulate the data, or at minimum,
there would be bad actors. And we were taking on some big money and big interests by bringing transparency to an industry that historically not so transparent, our food industry.
Right. So that was step one. Step two, we have a science advisory board. So an independent board of experts across the space that is
tasked with guiding our science and performing quarterly and annual reviews of our scoring system. So how we analyze and assess food’s health impacts and environmental impacts, and the how we assess foods compliance with different dietary needs and health goals, and making sure that we are following the science and using the right standards and the right data.
So step two and then step three, we have a public published conflict of interest policy that defines
how and when we engage with partners and some really core tenants that we operate with. And the one that I’ll really call out is that no brand can pay to change or influence their scores.
In any way. Yeah. Period.
Are the scores, you know, votes by the people somehow there’s got to be an open source component to this, but somehow there has to be also a, oh, I don’t know, a guard system to prevent
gaming the,
votes or whatever. However, you know, whatever determines the value of something, obviously you can’t change ingredients.
You know, ingredients are ingredients. But if there’s some kind of voting saying yes, you know, I see this as a great product choice endorsed by Dr Michael Haley.
How does it work where is the data come from? So we do not crowdsource anything at this time.
our food green score is this 1 to 100 food health score. That makes it simple and easy to compare products across any category in the grocery store. As I mentioned, it’s color coded traffic light style,
so you can just see green, yellow, orange, red and quickly compare choices.
The score assesses foods across four science based industry standards nutritional quality, ingredient processing, ingredient safety, and climate footprint. Each item is scored 1 to 100 for each one of those four categories, and then the final total Food Green score is simply the average of those four. Okay. Each one of those dimensions falls to its own standards. So for example when we look at food processing and our food processing score, it is based on a system called the Nova classification, which was developed by a set of academic researchers actually from Brazil, but has been adopted internationally as really the guiding standard for stratifying or classifying food processing.
But there’s limitations. So we also look to the World Health Organization to guide additional elements of that system. And we publish all of this publicly
on our website to follow. So that’s how we score items. And, you know, with it, we aim to be extremely transparent about why an item got the score, did so on the app.
You can scan a food, you see its score, but then you can click into any one of those four sections to see exactly why that item got the score. It did in a retail environment. When we deploy with the
grocery store, you can see the score on a shelf tag makes it really easy to make healthier choices without doing a ton of research.
And if you don’t at the time. But if you want to learn more, pull out your phone. Point your camera at the tag. There’s a QR code right there you can scan, and it’s going to give you that same information. Got it, got it, got it. Are there any perfect hundreds? There are. Yeah. There are really. Wow. Can you sort can you sort by the score.
You
cannot sort by the score in the app that the audience is going to use. But
that’s actually a feature that we’ll be release soon I would imagine that you know, it’s in early stages because there’s always room for growth and improvement. I want to talk about some of the challenges in the app that I’ve noticed only because, you know, I and by the time people see this or hear this podcast, who knows, maybe these things won’t be an issue.
And you already may have answered one of the challenges. Meaning I had thought that this scan feature I’m holding up a product that I just tested it on. You know,
I thought, well, let me just see
what this scores. And I thought that I could probably scan just that barcode that’s on it right there. But that’s not how it works, is it.
Yes it is. Okay. Now for me, I was getting an error.
Says there was an error processing the barcode. Do you know what would cause that
we don’t have 100% match, right?
So, you know, you know, 80% of most grocery stores are going to step into you be able to scan an item. I’m not sure. I can’t I can’t say what that would happen, but, we, we’ll look into it. Yeah. And, and, you know, and Galen, I obviously there’s always challenges. I’m going to hold up my screen,
my phone to, the coconut milk page here.
And the other issue I noticed, like in this particular case, the can that I just had in my hand, well, there’s two versions of it of the exact same can with different numbers. So obviously there’s some overlap. Yeah. And what would be responsible for that is reformulation most likely. So
one’s based on older data than, than the other.
And they’re actually two different pieces. Even though they look exactly the same and have the same name.
In this podcast, I met with Galen from Green Choice a, an app that you can take on your phone when you go grocery shopping. And to give you an example of how it might work. I actually tried it when I downloaded it right before the podcast, and the funny thing was, their system was down and it wasn’t working at the moment, but it’s working now, and they showed me everything works fine.
So as an example here, I imagine I’m grocery shopping searching for coconut milk. So I did a little search for coconut milk. And up comes some brands. Now they’re color coded. So yellow is kind of caution. And green is like go red is don’t get or stop. And I can scroll through and I can look for a brand that has a higher score, and then maybe look for that one in the store that I’m in.
another option is to scan what your products are in this store. So here
is a coconut milk as an example. And I’m going to hit the scan button right there.
And now I’m going to pick it up off the shelf in the grocery store and scan the barcode.
And it gives you a score.
You see a 78 unsweetened coconut milk. And if I want to, I can get more details about that and see how it got that score. And then below it are some other options.
So let’s go back to the scanning feature and scan a few other food items.
I’m grocery shopping and I see a coffee. While this happens to be the coffee that I like from,
Costco. And I’m going to scan the label and see what it scores.
And here we have the score on that particular product.
I can
click it for more details and see where it got the score from. And it looks like the one caution is in the climate footprint
section.
Here’s my Urban Meyer sea salt that I used to get from Whole Foods. They didn’t carry it anymore, so now I order it online. I’m a kind of a food snob. I like my specific things and this is one of the my favorite salts. So I’m scanning it and it’s scoring an 83.
here we have some organic pumpkin seeds from Costco. Let’s see how that scores.
That’s giving me an 89.
Well, anyway, you see that it does work. The app did not work when I downloaded it right before the podcast. Just so happened to be their system was down, but now you can see how the app would work. So enjoy the podcast.
Is this only brands that are in grocery stores because a lot of products are, you know, direct to consumer from the website. We go to websites, we want real special versions of certain foods, and we order them, have them directly shipped to us, but you can’t buy them in grocery stores.
Are those products going to somehow make it into the app sometime?
If the product is truly exclusively direct to consumer, it’s possible that we might not have it. Our focus is in helping Americans,
shop at the grocery store. We have analyzed over a million food and beverage products and counting. Just this year alone, we went from slightly north of
500,000. In January
to over a million today.
And so the data set and database continues to grow. And we’re very committed to continuing to add new products so that when you do scan, you get a result. And anecdotally, I mean, just last night I was in a Whole Foods and filming a little bit of content and scanned every single potato chip that they had on the shelf there.
So we certainly are
keen on bringing in new items as they launch.
I want to see that,
content. I guess you probably have a YouTube channel, because that would also kind I don’t no creating content I was thinking. maybe coming soon. Okay. I was thinking if you were demonstrating, I would watch that to learn how to better use the app.
Maybe coming soon.
All right, all right. That’s cool, and, oddly, you know, people
listening to this podcast can relate to what I’m saying because, I sell a product that is not available in stores. Actually, it might be available in some stores, but
raw. So because it’s raw, it’s farm to consumer,
it’d have to be sold for animal consumption only to bypass most of the laws in lots of states.
Yeah. And I, I also purchase a lot of things directly from the manufacturers, because that’s the kind of food I tend to eat. And it’s not going to be found in your typical, grocery store. I go to grocery stores to obviously, I got this kind of coconut milk from a grocery store or Costco. I don’t know if that’s a grocery store.
It’s a warehouse, super mega store. But I want to know about the things that I’m buying. And I think the app is really cool. Is there any competition?
Yeah,
there’s other apps out in most places, right? Yeah. Well, there’s other apps out there. Do you think that, you’re going to be leading the pack or you are leading the pack?
Yeah. You know, right now if you look at the space, you can find some apps
that you can scan to get nutritional. Essentially
the parallel that we would draw is to our nutritional quality score. So
there are apps out there that are looking at nutrient density. What we’ve found, is that a food’s healthfulness is much more than that.
And we work with academic partners and our science advisory board and scientists internally
to identify these sources and do the work that we are doing. But what we found is you can game the system. You spoke about gaming the system, talk about fortification of foods.
it is quite easy to, you know, build a nutrition facts panel that looks really good and have a very processed item that is not so healthful.
So I would say when we look at the market, we are unique in that we have a very comprehensive scoring system and the ability to really personalize your dietary profile so that you can scan in for a scan of food and immediately see you know, green check.
it matches or red X it conflicts with the profile that you have set for yourself?
Yeah. And when I think of gaming the data, I know there’s websites like Wikipedia for instance, that’s kind of open sourced, and they might have their ideal person that they allow to be an editor on that with certain agendas. And if someone like myself ever gets to, be an editor, I create content. They’ll review it and scrub it and change it and things get changed.
It’s not always truly open source where everyone can contribute. So I like the fact that you guys took a good, hard look at that and said, okay, we have to make sure we’re providing data that is not gamed. I mean, if my product was there and people could vote it up, I got a whole audience. I’d say, hey, look up our Aloe and go give it a thumbs up on Green Choice app.
If that was possible. Yeah. We’re not doing no, no shopper reviews. No, no customer reviews.
I think that information
is more accessible. You can find elsewhere.
not our focus. Yeah. United States only or worldwide were US focused right now. And where do you see it going? What do you see, being added to the app and what can people expect?
work candidly right now is in.
Making this information more accessible to more retailers and to shoppers through those retailers. You know, for every person that’s going to download an app, there’s, some multiple of people that won’t and yet could benefit from some help and easy access to information that supports their particular dietary and health needs and goals. And so, we are excited about continuing to scale our work nationally with retail partners,
to make this information widely available to shoppers, no matter the store and regardless of whether you have an app, download it or not and take one step out of the process so you don’t have to look anything up.
You don’t have to scan anything. You can see it on shelf. And then if you want to dive in, you can dive in. You,
mentioned,
making it profitable for shareholders. Do you actually have shareholders,
we have investors. Yeah.
we raise capital in the early days for the consumer app and the plan was always to work with retailers.
We just saw that the market wasn’t ready candidly in 2018, 2019 that retailers were not ready
to be transparent in the way that we wanted them to be. So we went direct to consumer to really build out the technology and the use case. But over the last couple years, we’ve been working
more with retailers as they finally catch up to realizing that we, as shoppers want this information.
And actually, it’s okay to say that and items not so good for you.
even if you’re selling it, that level of transparency we want from
our retailers, they can be companions and help us as we navigate the 30,000 items that are in the average grocery store. Right. It’s
so much choice.
chances are cookies aren’t going to rate that high, but it doesn’t mean no one’s going to want them.
You know,
there’s recreational foods, there’s placer foods out there so I can share and, and can I share a couple anecdotal stats with you that are few stats that will.
So you use cookies? I don’t know, I can easily follow up on this, but I’ll give you an example of Nut and Seed Butters Right.
So in a recent analysis, we looked at, just over 1400 Nut and Seed Butters that are sold across the US, across the 60 largest retailers. So think national and regional chains.
Looking at that selection, you have a processing score from 1 to 100. The range of items in that nut and seed butter category are scoring anywhere from the tens to the 90s for food processing and in nutrition 20s to the 90s.
And on one side of that spectrum, you have highly processed, refined seed oils, you have artificial additives, you have added sodium, you have added sugar, you have palm oil. And on the other end, you’ve got a single ingredient, peanut butter with just peanuts in it. And so, you know, we recognize that you might not want that single ingredient, peanut butter, but there is a huge spectrum that you have to choose from.
And this is true in essentially almost every category. Certainly when you’re in the center of the store, when you’re in frozen, you’re refrigerated, you have tremendous product choice. And so you as a shopper have a lot of agency
to trade up. And it doesn’t mean you need to go from the 10s or 20s if that’s where you’re purchasing to 80 or 90 overnight.
But you can make incremental little swaps that really add up and make a significant difference. And for the retailer, that’s good business.
helping
your customer live the life they want to live right? Pursue
the health journey that they’re on. Could I literally tell the app to,
not show me anything that has, added sugar?
Yes. I mean, that alone. I could imagine if I just checked the things I bought and made sure I didn’t buy anything with added sugar, that there could be life changing.
Or don’t show me anything with
artificial colors or artificial flavors.
don’t want it. I only want real foods.
Quick, quick fact there nearly 1 in 3 bakery products contain more than ten grams of added sugar.
So it’s half day, you know, more or less like half your daily limit in a single muffin or cookie. That’s crazy.
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I personally don’t think I actually buy any food with added sugar. I was actually looking for meat sticks the other day. And you know, I had to look at this one and grass fed added sugar, you know, why are you putting sugar in beef?
It just doesn’t make sense. But
they put it in everything. It’s in everything. So you really have to search.
And it’s crazy how quickly it can add up. Right? I mean, you know, the 50g of added sugar is national,
threshold for daily value, but the American Heart Association recommends lower values. Right to. I believe it’s 25g per day for women, 36 for men.
You know, you’ve got sodas that have 50g of added sugar in a single serving. You blow through your entire daily value of sugar in drinking that soda, or not even all of it. It’s. Yeah. It’s, so I can proudly say I haven’t had a soda in at least a decade. Probably a couple decades. I couldn’t imagine drinking that much sugar in a serving.
Couldn’t imagine it there. And yet at the same time, tens of millions of Americans do.
They? They don’t know. They don’t know what they’re doing to themselves. Diabetes is probably the number one
disease that causes all other disease. And yeah, seven of the top ten causes of death are diet related. Yeah. In the US. Galen, I don’t know.
Yeah, I almost don’t know.
the right questions to ask you on this. So what should I have asked you about?
Well.
Something that’s top of mind for, I think, many Americans right now is ultra processed food. They’ve heard about it in the news. They’ve heard about it from our administration. Some states are beginning to set snap waivers preventing people with Snap benefits from being able to spend money
on many foods in the store. A lot of this is being driven by awareness that ultra processed foods are highly connected to chronic illness and diet related disease, and so
in thinking about that and a recent analysis we did of ultra processed foods in our food.
I would say that there are some pretty interesting findings we had
that I’d love to share with you if you’re interested. Oh yeah. You know, I don’t want you to just share them with me. I want to go grocery shopping with you. Yes, let’s do it. Well, you know what? What city are you in? In Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Okay, we’re on opposite sides. I’m in San Diego, California, but I could imagine what a trip to the grocery store would be like with you. I want to see it on youtube. Honestly,
I love food like,
I’m a foodie. I obviously nerd out on this stuff. I love food, I love how it brings us together. I’m excited to try new things all the time.
So, you know, and
I recognize that, you know, I’m not perfect.
I want a sweet every once in a while. I want some sugar. Sometimes I want dessert sometimes. So, you know, it’s not no choice in isolation that really, at the end of the day is going to move the needle on your health like no single product instantly.
I mean, there’s
things that will impact you, your body instantaneously. I mean,
that’s true. But it’s really an aggregate what are we doing? What are we putting in our bodies? What are we doing? You know, three meals a day, day in, day out. How are we feeding our body? And are we
nourishing it with real food or not?
We did analysis of the 20 largest retailers in the US looking at the presence of processed food, highly processed food in the store and the results were staggering. So if you look at a Whole Foods or a sprouts.
15% of their catalog,
we would classify and scores highly processed, 14% for whole foods, 17% for sprouts. On the other end of that spectrum, if you go into a Kroger, 40% of their catalogue, okay. But the foods in that store highly processed. So.
Think about this. If you’re shopping at a
Whole foods or sprouts without having to think about any of this stuff, right? You have a third as many foods in that store that are highly processed. I mean, you are literally three and a half or so times less likely to encounter a highly processed food.
So while on the flip side,
in many conventional retailers, almost one out of every two items is highly processed. So that’s a huge difference in terms of access. And many Americans don’t have
the budget to be able to go and shop in a natural food store like Sprouts or Whole Foods. So you have choice. You do have choice when you’re in your retailer.
I mean, on the flip side, a third of those foods in that Kroger are not highly processed.
but you do have a more challenging
shopping process. You do have
information overload in a way that you don’t.
you need tools. And
that is where you can, you know, I might not be able to shop with you,
but you can use the Green choice app.
And I’d say that’s probably the next best thing
to
having a dietician with you. Yeah. And I’m not a dietitian, but I also use the Green Choice app to shop, and even it helps me. Yeah, and you don’t have to be a dietitian. You need common sense. And really, what is real food and how many steps were between the field and this particular product?
And, you know, the hundred percent. And I will say there’s a there’s another element which is not just common sense. There’s
an element
of access and convenience. Right. And so like there’s most people would agree like, yeah, they, you know, produce is healthy for them. But that doesn’t change the fact that they need a quick meal and they have no time to cook.
And so they’re looking at frozen meals. So they’re in center store looking at packaged goods. And then what. Yeah. Yeah. That that happens even in my family now and then. Yeah. Frozen pizzas. We’re only human, right. Frozen pizza. I’m glad you mentioned frozen pizza. Let me give you a stat there real quick. Huge range on one side of the spectrum, the total green score.
You’ve got pizzas in the 30s. And on the other side highest scoring pizza 89 frozen pizza. All right. Huge range of choices you can make. That’s something that’s pretty impressive that there would be such a big range and that a pizza would score an 89. Even. Yeah. Well,
think about you talking about real food. Right?
I mean, pizza, depending on the ingredients you’re using, it can be a simple, minimally processed real cheese. It can have veggies on it. It can have tomato sauce that doesn’t have a bunch of added sugar or additives added to it. Right? I mean, it’s basically tomatoes, cheese, maybe veggies and some whole grains as a dough, right? It can also be a lot of other things, and that’s the challenge a lot of other things.
Yeah. As someone that used to make homemade pizza and grind our own grains and make our own flour and dough and put whatever we wanted on it, we made something delicious. There you go. I bet it was good pizzas. Yeah, but never sold them as frozen. But why couldn’t a brand do that and put the same stuff together?
Freeze it
and that must be where the 89 is coming from. And I think that’s where the industry is hopefully going. You know, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there
that are trying to do better than it’s been done. Well, hopefully the app makes a big difference in people’s choices because you’re also voting with your dollars.
It’s supply and demand, and as long as you keep on buying the processed foods, people are going to keep on making them. And so I really feel we’re in control and we decide what’s available to us. And the Kroger is going to have the 40% highly processed, because people are going to keep buying them. So yeah,
we hold the power
We absolutely do. As consumers, I like it. Give us a call to action. Where’s the best place to go right now? I guess if you haven’t downloaded the app, you can go to the App Store or GreenChoice.co GreenChoice.co A lot more information about the work we’re doing, or the way that we analyze products and what’s coming out at GreenChoice.co
If you want to start scanning foods in your pantry or fridge or at the grocery store this weekend, check us out the search screen choice food scanner in your app store. It’s free to use and look forward to your feedback, and hopefully it’s helpful. All right. Great. Hey Galen, I appreciate you. Thank you for taking time to share that with us today.
Yeah. Thank you Michael, I really appreciate you having me.
I hope you enjoyed that episode today on the Dr. Haley Show. Make sure to hit subscribe on whichever platform you are listening to this. If this episode made you think of someone, go ahead, take a screenshot and share this exact episode with them. You can catch the show notes for this episode on drhaley.com. If you want to geek out with Dr. Michael Haley on other radical health topics.
Be sure to check out his YouTube channel where he posts exclusive video content. All the details are at drhaley.com and we can’t wait to hang out with you on the next episode.
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