WALMART

The opportunity for weight loss certainly hasn’t gone away — sales of diet-aid liquids were up 12.8% to $1.2 billion for the 52 weeks ended Sept. 9 across food, drug and mass (excluding Walmart), according to SymphonyIRI. And due to the temporary absence of GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli — unavailable because of a raw-ingredient sourcing issue — sales of diet-aid tablets are down with a 7% decline to a dollar base of 
$205.4 million. 
Alli had been removed from the market in March due to the third-party supply issue and returned in late June. 


Walmart in September partnered with HumanaVitality on a program that incentivizes healthier behavior, offering 5% savings on select healthier-for-you products. The program has about 1 million members.

“With [HumanaVitality’s] large population, we’ve got a lot of opportunities to collect data and to understand how this is … changing behaviors of individual shopping experiences,” said Joe Woods, HumanaVitality CEO.

Fall 2012 makeup was confident and sultry as lipstick made a comeback, at the expense of lip gloss, and eyes shouted sex appeal with dramatic eyeliner and bold brows. That’s the look that graced fashion runways, and judging by the numbers, consumers followed suit in the mass market.


The battle to capture and retain customers in a world where price, convenience and even customer service have become commoditized is in full swing. “The risk is you end up in a loyalty war [where] companies begin to use the loyalty scheme or the loyalty component of [the card] as another form of price escalation,” warned Bryon Pearson, president of LoyaltyOne and contributing editor to Colloquy, a magazine that has covered the loyalty marketing industry since 1990. “The intelligence that sits behind these programs is where the real value is,” he said.

NEW YORK — The Northeast is still recovering from one of the worst disasters it has ever faced. Many residents remain without electrical power, while others have lost their entire homes, businesses, workplaces and in a growing number of cases, their lives.

DALLAS — The Network of Executive Women, Consumer Products and Retail, has elected seven new members to its board at the Network's annual members meeting here during the recent NEW Leadership Summit.

More than 1,000 women and men attended the event, the largest in the organization's 11-year history.

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Sam's Club, via its Simply Right wellness brand, has donated $500,000 to Vitamin Angels, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing availability, access and use of micronutrients among at-risk populations in need. The monetary donation will help Vitamin Angels expand their efforts to reach at-risk children age five and under with vitamin A and daily multivitamins and pregnant or breastfeeding women with prenatal vitamins around the world and domestically.

CHICAGO – Quaker Oats, a divison of PepsiCo, has introduced Quaker Popped — a rebranded version of the company's popular Quaker Quakes snack.

Quaker Popped are bite-size snacks made from whole-grain brown rice and corn, with 10 to 13 grams of whole grain per serving and zero grams of trans fat. Because the snacks are popped, and not fried, they contain lower fat than a number of fried snacks.