Healthy Food Marketing: Making Healthy Food Accessible To Americans, Regardless Of Their Income

When it comes to healthy food, we have been conditioned to associate high quality with high prices.

Although I love stores like Whole Foods and Fresh Market there are so many Americans who can’t afford the high prices and therefore are deprived of fresh and healthy food. There’s a big and important opportunity for big brands to make healthy food more accessible to the population of Americans that needs it most.  Healthy food marketing can save the day.

Two companies that are pioneering the crusade are Hampton Creek and Luvo.

Hampton creek makes plant-based Just-mayo and Just-cookies and Luvo is a frozen food company committed to healthy, convenient frozen. The progressive CEO of Hampton Creek, Joshua Tetrick said, “Nothing frustrates me more than thinking that good food only has a place with people who make more than $100,000. We all miss the point if we think that.”

He explained at the Partnership for a Healthier America’s Summit in Washington how companies can still lower their price point and succeed by simply taking a different distribution approach than many health food brands do. He sold his product at the Dollar Store in low-income areas, and it did extraordinarily well, proving that this can actually work.

Luvo deliberately chose to go into mainstream grocery stores in order to make their product more affordable and accessible to lower-income consumers.

The inspiring CEO of the company, Christine Day, said that it would have been easy for Luvo to go the normal route most health brands do and market their product at a higher price point in high-end grocery and health food stores. Instead, Day says Luvo decided that is was more important to get their high quality offering to more people.

Although she recognizes that it can be hard for healthy food brands to do this, as their profit margins may already be low, Day firmly believes there are ways around it.

Luvo skips traditional marketing and spends the money instead on the quality and reach of their product. They choose instead to market in non-traditional ways, creating compelling healthy food marketing content for consumers which is becoming much more relevant in today’s marketing space anyway.

The real win here goes way beyond profits.

There is a HUGE opportunity for healthy food marketing to positively influence the overall health of the US population.

According to USDA, 14.5% of households in the U.S are food insecure – meaning, they lack access to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle. And 79% percent of those households report buying inexpensive, unhealthy food as a way to feed household members. The number is even higher in households with children.

As marketers we know brands supportive of issues that are important to consumers have the potential to become truly irresistible. Getting fresh, healthy food to all of America may be one of the most important issues of our time.

I personally pre-pledge my allegiance to the brands that become part of this crusade and I suspect that most of America will too. You can keep up with my endeavors on my twitter.