Food City cooks up wellness in the Healthy Living Kitchen

If you ask executives at Food City, it’s part of the role of a supermarket pharmacy operator to help its customers understand how healthy eating plays into overall health and wellness. It’s a responsibility they take pretty seriously.

“I think in the supermarket we should be focusing on what are healthy eating habits,” Don Clark VP pharmacy services told DSN. “Obesity in the United States is the root of a lot of these health problems that we have.”

To help keep its end of the bargain, Food City in January partnered with the University of Tennessee Medical Center to expand the reach of Healthy Living Kitchen, a program that brings nutrition education to schools, community events and local Food City stores.

Consisting of a registered dietitian, cardiac nurse specialist and senior executive chef from UT Medical Center, the Healthy Living Kitchen team presents healthy cooking classes and provides information on nutrition, label reading and making the right choices while grocery shopping. The expanded program will include grocery shopping tours at select Food City stores with a UT Medical Center registered dietitian.

The program fits in well with Food City’s NuVal system, which scores more than 35,000 food items on a scale of 1 to 100, taking into consideration more than 30 nutrients and evaluating the dietary importance; the higher the score, the higher the nutrition.