Making healthier choices: Overview
- Ninety-two percent of consumers want to eat more healthily, but only 14% consider their diets very healthy, highlighting a significant intention-action gap
- Retailers, manufacturers and governments must work together to make healthy choices easier to find, understand and afford
- Health-focused products can drive customer loyalty and sales growth, showing healthier choices are good for business
- Affordability and nutrition confusion remain major barriers, with just 13% of consumers feeling very confident identifying healthy food and drink
- Tailored health messaging, clear labelling and market-specific solutions are key to helping consumers turn healthy intentions into everyday habits
There is often a gap between what consumers say they want and what they actually do, but a new retailer report discussed at Future Food-Tech London reveals a vast gulf when it comes to eating healthily.
It found that while 92% of consumers want to change their diets to be healthier, these good intentions are not translating into healthier diets. Only 14% believe their diets are ‘very healthy’ and 23% are satisfied with their physical health.
The report is from Ahold Delhaize, the parent company of international retail brands in Europe and the US, serving 77 million customers per week. It surveyed 8,000 consumers in seven markets across 48 food retailers.
“We knew there would be a gap,” says Alex Holt, chief sustainability officer at Ahold Delhaize, ”but the scale of it was surprising."
The picture it paints is of consumers who are keen to do better than they do, so how can the say-do gap be closed?
The whole supply chain is responsible
The retailer is the end point of the product journey, the place where the final decision is made by the consumer, but the responsibility for helping consumers make healthier choices lies across the supply chain, from farmers to manufacturers.
“Manufacturers – which we would call our supply partners – play a critical role,” says Holt. The research showed that one of the barriers to healthier choices was consumers not knowing if a product was relevant to their needs, that it wasn’t simple enough to find them. “Those things are not just achieved by a retailer but by working with manufacturers,” she says.
Public-private collaboration is also key. For example, the UK government has announced plans for mandatory reporting of healthy food sales for large companies. It also plans to set mandatory targets for healthy food sales, which incentivises companies to improve.
This kind of action works and it works quickly. Even before legislation is introduced, 18 companies in 2026 have disclosed data on healthy sales or set targets, up from seven in 2024, says the report.
Healthier choices don’t mean less profit
Retailers don’t lose out from encouraging healthier choices. In fact, quite the opposite – it can boost engagement and brand loyalty. The report found that making healthy food affordable was the strongest factor that consumers are likely to respond to, closely followed by offering a wider variety of fruit and vegetables, and suggesting healthy meals and the ingredients can be bought in one click.
“I still get asked by other companies whether offering healthier choices will affect profit,” says Holt. “They see it as a trade-off but it’s not. The reason why it’s not is if you’re really focusing on what your customer wants, they’ll come in and shop more with you. And healthy products are growing faster than unhealthy products, which is a trend that’s happening globally. Do it not just because it’s the right thing but because it’s good for business.”
The interventions most likely to drive customer engagement fell into three categories: making healthier choices more affordable, making them easier to find and making these choices more relevant to individual needs.
Providing healthy options actually ranks ahead of other attributes that attract consumers to a particular shop, such as a variety of sweets and snacks.
Consumer confidence needs a boost
A staggering statistic revealed by the report is that just 13% of people feel very confident identifying healthy food and beverages.
Has the food industry overcomplicated nutrition? The confusion is broader than just the food industry, says Holt. Messaging on social media about what’s healthy and what’s not is hugely confusing. Some countries are making great progress towards helping with on-pack labelling, she says, but retailers need to innovate and pilot schemes to see what helps.
Clear and consistent visual cues are helpful. Schemes such as Nutri-Score in Europe can help guide consumers, but retailers can pitch in. For example, Ahold Delhaize USA uses Guiding Stars, a nutrition programme that helps shoppers find nutritious options with a simple visual cue.
Evidence shows that when healthier choices are easier to find, it reduces the gap between intention and action.
Affordability is complex
While very cheap food is often not healthy, says the report, guidance on affordable ingredients often requires people to cook from scratch, which is not possible for everyone, depending on their life circumstances and skill levels.
At the other end of the spectrum, foods with health claims (that aren’t actually necessary for a healthy diet) such as high protein or organic, are expensive. This cements the perception of healthy food being unaffordable.
Retailers need to balance promotions and subsidies towards healthier options, and this can be co-ordinated with manufacturers.
Affordability functions as both a barrier and a signal; when healthier options are priced competitively, they feel normal, attainable and worth trying, says the report.
Know your audience
Reasons for making healthier choices vary by market, life stage, context and personal choice, says the report, with consumers in Greece being more driven by gut health, for example, price in Belgium and weight management in the US. Products can fail in one location and succeed in another.
Retailers and manufacturers have the opportunity to create needs-based products that can resonate with shoppers. The report also found that health messaging anchored in occasions and specific meals is more engaging than general nutrition guidance.
Ultimately, it concludes, “our opportunity is to make health feel achievable by embedding healthier choices into the rhythms of everyday life, market by market and household by household”.
Ahold Delhaize will release the full report on October 12.
