Healthy Eating
Various ingredient scares and food programme highlight, in their completely different ways, the emphasis on healthy eating in the news and on the public and political agendas. The trend of an increased awareness of healthy eating has been growing over the past two or three years, and has impacted demand for wholefood.
Jane Straker at Myriad Organics, Ludlow, reflecting on the upsurge in business reported by health food retailers in the UK in the summer of 2004, reported in Natural Products (September 2004) said:
“There is another recurring theme that comes up when speaking to almost everyone in the trade [wholefood retail] – the ‘McKeith effect’… I’ve actually been selling out of brown rice and I can’t seem to get enough nuts, beans and seeds to satisfy demand!”
The evidence of a real change in public attitudes and behaviour in relating to food comes from many different sources. Here are just a few examples:
- Most major supermarkets have developed labelling methods to emphasise low fat, low salt, low GI and low calorie food.
- The total market for vegetarian foods has risen by 67 per cent to be worth £630 million, according to research by Keynote, in 2003.
Even before the ‘McKeith effect’, there was a growing public interest in healthy eating. A factor that has almost understandably contributed to this trend is the large number of high-profile food-related news stories over recent years.
Wholefood Planet products are selected, as far as possible, on the guiding principle of ‘nothing added, nothing taken away’, whilst Wholefood Planet employees are required to acquire product knowledge and to be available for customer queries about the various products stocked.
Wholefood Planet also stocks a wide variety of restricted diet products, know as “free-from products”. Mintel research found that sales of free-from products increased by 327% between 2000 and 2005 with an overall market value of £90 million. The report predicts that sales in this sector will double by 2010.