Encouraging ICA shoppers to choose healthier products

Challenge

As part of ICAs initiative to promote health and wellbeing in Sweden, particularly for children and teenagers, as a partnership with Gen Pep, they turned to Impactually. Our task was to explore ways ICA could nudge their shoppers in stores and online to choose healthier products, all the while maintaining their shoppers freedom of choice – so not taking any products out of the assortment, and also not creating any economic incentives – not changing prices.

Intervention

We helped lead a multi-functional team within ICA, which included store owners (handlare), the e-commerce team, a nutritionist, the brand and marketing etc., as well as external agencies, in a process to identify potential behavioral interventions to achieve the objective of encouraging shoppers to choose healthier. We discussed the current state of what is happening today: How are the grocery stores physically structured, what do people see when they come in, throughout their shopping trip and by the checkout – and what kind of decisions does that drive them towards. We discussed different cognitive biases which influence people’s decisions in the wrong way and how we can help them overcome those.

Impact

The process resulted in a list of potential initiatives to test and implement by individual store owners, as well as an online campaign. The campaign used nudging by placing reminders in unexpected categories: “don’t forget the vegetables” in the meat section, “try some healthy snacks” in the candy section, “natural flavoring with berries” in the yogurt section.