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Some of the country's leading grocery store chains feature NuVal™ in their stores such as Price Chopper, HyVee and Meijer. United Supermarkets is the first and only grocer in Texas that will offer this unique service. This initiative will begin in our Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex Market Street stores in March 2010 as we celebrate National Nutrition Month. The program will roll out in other Market Street, United Supermarkets and Amigos United stores later in 2010. We plan to have this program available across all three banners and in all store locations to better serve you.
It's Simple - It provides comprehensive nutritional information in one simple number between 1 and 100; the higher the score, the better the nutrition.
It's Inclusive - The system scores all kinds of food - from apples to chips and from store brands to national brands; any food that contains calories can be scored.
It's Convenient - Scores are right on the shelf price tag so you can compare similar products side-by-side or across different categories (for example, canned versus frozen products).
It's Objective and Comprehensive - This system was developed over a 2-year period of time by a team of respected nutrition and medical professionals from leading health organizations and universities; it was funded by Griffin Hospital, a non-profit community hospital and teaching affiliate of the Yale School of Medicine. Scores are calculated using a sophisticated system which looks at more than 30 different attributes of food. Boiled down to its simplest description, nutrients with generally favorable effects on health are place in the numerator of the equation and nutrients with generally unfavorable effects on health are placed in the denominator of the equation. In addition to the numerator and denominator nutrients, the algorithm takes into account other key factors that measure the quality and density of nutrients, as well as the strength of their association with specific health conditions.
It's Value-focused - You can compare price and nutrition, side-by-side on the same tag, so you can get the most nutrition for your money.
NuVal™ was developed in response to America's troubling health trends - rapidly rising rates of obesity and diabetes in both adults and children - as a potential vehicle to improve public health. With the NuVal™ system, store guests will no longer have to scour the nutritional labels of products to find what they believe to be the most nutritious. In addition, this program will replace our current nutritional tag program as a more inclusive and comprehensive system as mentioned above. Since the NuVal™ system does not currently address gluten-containing foods, we plan to keep our Gluten Free nutritional shelf tag for your convenience.
To date, NuVal™ has researched and scored almost 38,000 products in produce, seafood, meat, poultry, salty snacks, cookies and crackers, cereals, frozen foods and other departments. Scores will roll out by category over time, and eventually, almost every product in our supermarkets will have a NuVal™ score! Categories of foods have different ranges and medians of scores. For example, cereals range from 4 to 100 which is the largest range in the store whereas meats peak at around 50 and seafood at 89. Since variety is a must for balanced nutrition, one is not required to only choose foods that score from 90 to 100. In future articles, we will give more details about each category of food with specifics on how to choose the most value for your money throughout the supermarket!
To get you started thinking in the NuVal™ way, here are some products for you to evaluate to determine which would receive the highest score and thus be most nutritious.
We encourage you to go to www.nuval.com to learn more and play the Nutrition by the Numbers Game for more practice using the NuVal™ scoring system.
NuVal™ is coming to Texas in select store locations in March! Watch for more details on this exciting and unique program to serve you better!