Aryn Doll

SENIOR NUTRITION AND EDUCATION SPECIALIST, NATURAL GROCERS, LAKEWOOD, COLO.

What’s one cool thing you’ve done in the past year to help elevate/promote health and wellness at retail?

Aryn Doll: This past year, our Nutrition Education Department was thrilled to partner with our marketing team to develop a strategy that shares more nutrition related content and information with our customers, particularly via our social media platforms. This included the development of a “What’s New Wednesday” Instagram story campaign where every Wednesday, our Nutritional Health Coaches (NHCs) share nutrition tidbits on new, healthy products in our stores to help educate customers and get them excited. This has not only helped to elevate health and wellness promotions but has also served as an innovative marketing strategy to increase awareness of our NHCs and the services they provide, such as free virtual and telephone one-one-one health coaching sessions.

What’s next as we ease out of the pandemic?

While we look forward to the day when we can invite our customers to in-person events and health coaching sessions, virtual is not going away, and it is exciting to see how well our customers have adapted to virtual learning. That said, we will continue to offer free, virtual nutrition services, including video one-on-one health coaching sessions and online outreach classes, to ensure customers have continued access to high-quality nutrition education. We also hope to streamline and improve upon these services to make them easier to use and to provide an outstanding virtual experience.

In addition, following the success of our 100% virtual and free four-week Keto Reset class series in 2021, we are looking forward to expanding our nutrition programing and will be offering a new three-week program at the beginning of 2022. This class series will be focused on helping our customers get back to the basics of health and will provide nutrition content (in addition to interactive seven-day nutrition and lifestyle challenges) to help customers achieve a healthier diet and lifestyle and support healthy blood sugar balance and detoxification—all foundational principles for promoting optimal health.