The supermarket chain has opened a new center at its Mayfield Village location to help shoppers change their diets based on their personal health statistics.
MAYFIELD, Ohio — It’s a new concept for a better way to connect health and wellness to the food you buy every day.
“We’re a grocery store, and we’ve always wanted to educate our people about food,” says Jeff Heinen, co-owner of Heinen’s Fine Foods.
For more than 90 years, Heinen’s has been a local staple for all things food, but now they’re hoping to add personalized health in the form of a personalized nutrition hub inside their Mayfield Village grocery store.
“Why can’t a grocery store be the pharmacy of the future?” Hein asks. “So we started down this road to try to help educate our customers about food and health and how they’re connected.”
Shoppers can enter the personalized nutrition center and get a panel that analyzes their blood and urine. The results are divided into three tracks of health, digestive, immunological and cardiovascular. Buyers will then meet with a Heinen doctor and dietitian to determine where they stand and what they should eat to get better. They will have that information the next time they pick up a shopping cart.
“We worked to develop a food and supplement plan to help move that needle in the right direction,” said Melanie Jatsek, Heinen’s senior registered dietitian.
“We think this is the future of medicine for a lot of different reasons,” added medical director Dr. Todd Pesek. “That’s why we’re going down this path.”
So how far does that road lead? For now, the personalized nutrition center is open and ready for shoppers in Mayfield Village, but Heinen’s hopes that’s just the beginning. Depending on the success, they would like to expand to other places in the future.
“I think when people understand ‘I can eat healthy, it doesn’t cost me more and by the way it tastes good,’ it becomes a lot easier,” Heinen surmised.
