Episode 104 | Oct 31, 2024

Grocery Stores As Health Hubs, With Irina Pelphrey

Can grocery stores become the new front lines for health and wellness? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi sits down with Irina Pelphrey, Group Vice President of Health at Albertsons Companies, to reveal how major retail outlets are transforming into wellness hubs. Irina shares her journey and vision for making health services and nutritional guidance accessible through innovative platforms like Sincerely Health, which empower customers to build healthy habits right from their grocery list.

“Self-agency works. Wanting to do something, even if it’s a little step, we recognize that and we reward that. We want to be an everyday partner, providing motivation, providing tools, and, of course, making it easy to make healthy choices.”

Irina Pelphrey, Group Vice President of Health

Throughout their conversation, Dr. Sandi and Irina highlight how the Sincerely Health platform empowers customers to monitor their nutrition, track activity, and receive personalized shopping guidance, including dietary insights based on USDA’s MyPlate guidelines. By offering features like cart analysis and personalized nutrition tracking, Sincerely Health meets customers where they are, making it easier to achieve their health goals. Irina shares practical examples, such as rewards and incentives through the Albertsons app, that turn grocery shopping into an opportunity for healthier choices and personalized support.

Health coaches will find Irina’s approach especially inspiring for their own work in supporting client goals and healthy lifestyle changes. With the potential for collaboration between health coaches and retail partners like Albertsons, coaches can guide clients to access supportive digital tools, from activity tracking to dietary guidance, even offering in-store navigation support for clients with specific needs. As the grocery experience becomes more health-focused, coaches have new opportunities to help clients make informed choices in their local stores and set actionable goals for long-term wellness.

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Dr. Sandi: Do you have a preconceived notion about large supermarket chains, those also attached to large pharmacy outlets? Well, today we’re going to look inside one of those chains. And I hope that the information that’s presented will lead to a new awareness of what’s possible within large retail stores.

One of the things that we acknowledge is that, for many people, particularly in rural areas, that large outlet is their access to healthcare. It is their access through the pharmacist at that store where that individual can be acting like a health coach. They are also getting nutrition information. And we talk particularly about Albertsons. And my special guest today is somebody who I really want you to get to know. Her name is Irina Pelphrey. She is on a mission for health and wellness within Albertsons.

Let me tell you a little bit about Irina. Irina Pelphrey is a collaborative healthcare leader with a passion for retail, solving complex customer problems, and providing accessible health and wellness experiences for all. She’s the group vice president of health at Albertsons Companies. She’s consistently delivered financial results across various store banners while keeping Albertsons’ customers at the heart of everything she does.

She joined Albertsons in 2021. Since then, she has led the charge on the launching of Sincerely Health, a wellness and pharmacy platform that inspires healthy lifestyle and wellness habits for Albertsons’ customers within its digital app and provides easily accessible transaction features for medical needs. With the aim of making health and well-being accessible, Irina assisted in the creation of Sincerely Health to promote a better living that includes gamification elements to honor any health goals met with discounts and coupons for nutritional products.

Under her leadership, Sincerely Health has included helpful features like nutrition insights, which measure grocery purchases based on serving recommendations for example. Sincerely Health is accessible to Albertsons’ over 10 million customers who use the Albertsons app, which has earned a 4.8 app rating in the app store.

Irina is also the driving force behind Payer Programs related to health, equity, and nutrition that utilize all grocery and digital assets. Working closely with her team, Albertsons has facilitated partnerships with financial services and providers to expand supplemental benefits for healthy eating and over-the-counter medication for those in the healthcare-managed care market. With a strong fervor for building relationships with stakeholders to achieve collaborative results, these partnerships underscore her commitment to enhancing the well-being of Albertsons’ local communities and ensuring that individuals have convenient access to the items they need to support their health and wellness.

So, without further ado, I bring you Irina Pelphrey. We’re going to talk about Albertsons and health and wellness within this retail outlet. Welcome, Irina. It’s so great to have you as a guest.

Irina: Sandra, it’s a pleasure to be on.

Dr. Sandi: Can you start by sharing a bit about your own journey? How did you come to have this particular focus, health and wellness, within a retail outlet?

Irina: I stumbled into healthcare really in a retail setting. So, I was working for another large retailer, Walmart, and focusing on bringing healthcare into a retail setting through partnerships with hospital systems at that time. It became really apparent to me that a lot can be done in a retail setting from taking care of minor illnesses in an urgent care setting to preventive care that’s delivered by pharmacists such as vaccines, medication, therapy, and increasingly point-of-care testing for what could be strep now these days, flu, COVID, things like that.

That really opens up a lot of possibilities for customers to take care of a lot of preventive needs and basic needs. And that made me think like, “Well, what about the daily needs, right?” We all shop for food. We all use grocery. How can supermarkets and grocers make an impact there? So, that’s really where I came to this passion of mine, which is what I want to talk about today is the role of lifestyle in prevention and disease management and how Albertsons is partnering with our customers in that journey.

Dr. Sandi: Wow. That is inspirational because people visit their grocery store, their pharmacist more frequently than they do their doctor. And we were facing particularly a shortage of primary care doctors’ availability of services. So, having this in their neighborhood really can be transformational. Can you share the reach of Albertsons? Because we’re not just talking about Albertsons as a store, but you have many different names under the Albertsons brand.

Irina: Yeah. So, we have locations in 34 states, about 2,300 locations with 1,700 pharmacies within them. So, some of the banners that people know and love are Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons. Albertsons is of course one of them. I’m in Texas, so some of the well-knowns one are Tom Thumb, Market Street, United Supermarkets, Randalls, and the like. So, we serve our customers in the communities, and they know us as their grocery, and they know their pharmacists by name. So, it’s not just the frequency and fresh produce connection, but it’s also a clinical connection in some cases where their pharmacist is probably the most accessible clinician in their life.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, that is so, so true, particularly in rural areas and areas that are underserved in terms of having clinics that are serving people’s needs, especially in primary care. And I love what you said in terms of their own. It’s their community pharmacist where they know that person by name. And I think we’ve lost so much of that. And that’s one of the reasons I train health coaches, because they’re bringing back what we used to call bedside manner, where if they are on a care team, they are the ones that are taking the time with people. And one of the things they can do is educate them and help them to be discerning consumers when they enter a store, which can be overwhelming in terms of the number of foods that are on those shelves and how to shop. So, how do you address that? How do you address what you said is your passion, health and wellness?

Irina: So, aside from our in-store presence and the role our dietitians and our pharmacists play maybe for in-store services, we really leaned in with digital. Sincerely Health is our wellness platform. Given that we serve about 40 million households and a very large version of them engages with us digitally, it made sense to incorporate our wellness solution within our ecommerce app.

So, Sincerely Health serves two sets of customers. Some manage their medication needs, so medication refills, scheduling vaccines, things like that, what we call digital pharmacy. And some manage their wellness. So, they engage in health goals such as nutrition goals. They actually manage their nutrition profiles and look after their shopping and improving their diet and their basket composition with us. And some do things like mindfulness and sleep tracking through our app. So, we serve a variety of people with different needs and disease states through that platform.

And our big focus is on improving activity and helping them understand basics of nutrition in a very easy to comprehend way. So, we partner with USDA MyPlate. That’s always a good starting point. I think there are variations for different disease states, but in general, if you load up on fruits and veggies and really think about lean proteins and adding whole grains to your diet, that’s typically a good start for most people.

So, some of our deeper and unique features really focus on how can you break down your basket, your cart that you shopped the last month, the last week, understand how well you’re doing on essential foods that are defined within MyPlate and then occasional foods, maybe those snacks or those guilty pleasures that we all can indulge in every now and then but should probably keep an eye on. So, that’s one of our most popular features. Customers really like it because they can also not only track the composition but they can also declare goals, such as I want to eat more fiber, or I want to lower my carbs. Oh, and by the way, my child has a gluten sensitivity, so I want to see recipes and products that meet those needs for our household.

So, these are some of the tangible ways we can meet customers where they are. And some customers have done a daily basis, weekly basis where maybe they’re closing their Apple Rings and getting healthy points in our system. Maybe they’re checking their last week’s purchases to see if they met their vegetable goal and get rewards for that. So, you can see, Sandra, not only we’re giving them the tools, but we’re also providing them in the form of healthy points that are convertible to grocery coupons for healthier items as well. So, we want to be an everyday partner, providing motivation, providing tools, and of course, making it easy to make healthy choices.

Dr. Sandi: I think you hit on a winning formula, making it easy, having some incentive, and making it fun, gamifying or having a motivation. If I can get a coupon, I can save some money, which is important. And also that you are not just looking at “eat this, don’t eat that,” but you’re focusing on personalizing it if they have special needs for their particular diet. So, it’s precision nutrition, as well as the other lifestyle factors, which are often ignored. We don’t think of a grocery store focusing on movement or getting those steps in as well as sleep or stress. You talked about mindfulness. So, when you put all that together, and we know from research that this is powerful, those modifiable lifestyles are what can be… Those factors can be modified and really make a dent in those biomarkers that have to do with metabolic disease, for example.

So, I bet you have lots of success stories and we need them. It’s been estimated that only 7% of adult Americans are metabolically healthy. We have a growing basically epidemic of obesity. So, what have you seen that warms your heart in terms of success stories from customers?

Irina: Yeah, Sandra, we do see that. Well, first of all, self-agency works. Wanting to do something, even if it’s a little step, we recognize that and we reward that. But in general, we encourage people to make small steps. So, we do see a change in activity levels because for customers who connect their wearables, we can see their activity before and we can see them after when they take those step goals, or it might be a different type of… They work out in the gym. So, that’s one. We do see a shift in their nutritional behavior. They are opting for maybe a little bit healthier option. For example, if someone picks up a goal of cooking more at home or adding more fiber through legumes or adding more fruit into their diet, that reflects in their consumption as well. So, we can tangibly track that.

There’s one testimonial that I saw about a month ago where a customer was with us for about a year. She was very engaged. She connected her wearables. She was also our pharmacy customer. She engaged in a lot of nutrition challenges. And she reported that she was really happy with the experience, and she lost 40 pounds as a combination of different things that she was doing for herself. And we’re just really proud to be a partner with customers like that who are striving to do better for themselves, making those little steps that ultimately add up in a big way.

Dr. Sandi: I love that. And I love also that every time… My local Albertsons connection would be a Jewel-Osco. And every time I go into the store, I’m just impressed that there are more and more organic offerings. Years and years ago, I remember back in the ’80s, there would be these small mom and pop health food stores. And in a regular grocery store or supermarket, there was nothing or maybe there was two shelves for the health foods. And now that’s really changed. And there are so many offerings. There are so many brands. We don’t have to go to a store that is dedicated as a so-called health food brand supermarket. And I just wonder if you could comment on that.

Irina: Yeah, that’s a really important area for us. So, we have a large private label on-brand portfolio where we provide different types of products and different assortments for different needs in the customer’s lives. But one of them is our O Organics line. So, it’s an organic line of packaged goods and fresh produce that we’re really proud customers love but trends really well compared to any national brand and is chosen by many customers as their primary brand. I actually love some of the cereals and other products. So, we are investing a lot into the quality of private label products and also happy to feature national suppliers who have high-quality products as well.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, that’s a wonderful initiative. And I think awareness has grown so much, and we have more and more consumers who are well informed. And so we’re seeing this transformation, and it’s easier and easier to get some of these products. So, can you share how the dieticians work within Albertsons?

Irina: We have dietitians focused on a couple of areas. Some support, as I mentioned, our own brand product development, so formulations and labeling and things of that nature. We have a really unique offering called meal plan within our ecommerce experience, which is also integrated into Sincerely Health. Majority of those meals are fairly healthy, and we have dietitians working on developing those. Recently had an addition of high protein, high fiber snacks and bites. So, you can check it out in the app or online. So, that’s the type of work that they do to make it easily accessible because so many customers engage digitally.

The last but not least, curation of actually technology features that help customers make those personalized food choices is backed by the research of our dietitians and their clinical guidance as well on what diets are trending. It could be keto, it could be Mediterranean, vegan, or what low carb lifestyle looks like for customers who might be living with diabetes, what those choices look like. So, we really have a good partnership with our dietitians. And I think the benefit of that allows to scale access to dietitian advice and maybe those one-on-one consultations that are so invaluable. Some people don’t even need them because they can find their personalized resources upfront and try to do it digitally first.

Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. I think what you’re describing is a personalized approach that it is not one size fits all. And certainly nutrition is not a one size fits all. We’ve been there in the past and it doesn’t work. There’s no way of eating that is good for everybody. So, it sounds like you’re accommodating various dietary needs, which is so important.

We’ve heard a lot about the coming AI revolution in healthcare, and certainly we know that precision diagnostics are going to improve because of AI. We’re also hearing about AI health coaches, and I’ve been writing a lot about this, that those are fine if your watch can give you advice, for example, your health, but it’s not a human heart to heart-to-heart conversation and the appeal of having somebody who really is going to be your ally, your key support. And I wonder if you would comment on that so in terms of any plans to go further into tech or possibly again, seeing the value of people coming into the store, having that connection with their community store.

Irina: Yeah, so I think it’s hard to pick one or the other path because I absolutely agree. Behavioral motivation, there is no better way to do it than through a trusted relationship, really understanding what makes people tick. And some of the best examples we have are programs that our pharmacists run, where they really understand the specifics of the patient situation and they can set smart goals with them, understanding like, “Okay, maybe losing 50 pounds is not achievable for you in the next 6 months, but maybe swapping vegetables for fries can be.”

So, that said, technology also plays a role and where we think it does isn’t serving up insights and maybe, in some cases, next best action that a customer can consider and opt in or opt out of. So, the way I think of it, any health coach or clinician audience is going to be limited. You may meet once a week, or you may have chat access or telephonic access, but in most cases, it’s not unlimited. Where we see AI and digital tools, those are typically in a person’s pocket accessible any time. And if they pop up in the form of push notifications or insights, or when they log into an app, that can also change behavior for the good. So, I think they can work synergistically.

Dr. Sandi: I agree completely. It’s not either/or, but it is that combination that can really transform healthcare. And we are looking at things like remote patient monitoring, where Linux are looking at all this data or your pharmacist can look at all the data that’s coming in from your watch, from your sleep ring, for example, that’s tracking your sleep. And there’s so many different ways, your continuous glucose monitor, which will soon be available. So, you can go into your local pharmacy and get a continuous glucose monitor because it’s now been approved for not needing a prescription. I think that will be coming very soon. It’s just a matter of time, so it’s a great way where people can track their blood sugar throughout the day and then get feedback and support from services like the ones you offer.

What would you say? What’s the future? What are you looking in terms of future initiatives? Or, what would be an ideal future in terms of your initiative, in terms of growth of Sincerely Health? What would you project?

Irina: I think we see pretty strong customer adoption where the customer’s agency and their investment and their well-being really matters. We would love to see more collaboration with health professionals. So, whether incorporating Sincerely Health as a tool as part of their care plan. So, I believe not enough is done for the day to day. A doctor sees a patient on average, what, 2.5 times a year, maybe 80 minutes max. Then you have other types of specialists and professionals and health coaches in some cases intervening but not everyone has access to it. So, just providing basic level of lifestyle change and behavioral change support is really important for anyone because anyone can use a little bit of improvement. So, incorporating that into care plans, especially for patients living with chronic disease, I think would be huge. And like our experience is free, and in fact, if you engage, you get coupons and it actually pays to belong to be a Sincerely Health member.

Dr. Sandi: I love that, and I think the role of health coaches can work with individuals, especially if they’re on collaborative care teams, and those patients might not be aware of something like this app, Sincerely Health. And so they can help them to download it, help them use it, especially for an older population that might not be as tech savvy. They can show them how it works, how they can save money, get coupons, how it can be very motivating, and even do things like tours of the store.

Back in the day when I was a clinical psychologist, I was a health psychologist, and I ran groups. And we often had field trips. And we would get permission from the local store, but we would go down the aisles and I would teach people how to read labels, how to be discerning customers, how to shop fruits and vegetables on the perimeter first, how to get your protein needs, and then how to actually save money by getting the healthier option. So, they loved it, and they loved… or I would often have presentations and webinars and workshops about this and incorporate… Actually one we did with a local grocery chain, and they actually had a little area for people to come. And I did a back to school how to prepare healthy snacks for your kids. And it was in coordination with the store. So, it was a lot of fun and really effective.

So, you are really an innovator because we don’t think of the grocery store or the pharmacy, in a way, as being this full-service nutrition or health-focused outlet. And I just really applaud your efforts. What do you think about the potential and are your stores connected with a service that would deliver something like an Instacart and any work with that?

Irina: Yeah, we do have actually multiple food delivery marketplaces that we work with—Instacart, Uber, DoorDash. And we also offer first-party delivery, which is picked and fulfilled by our own drivers in some locations. And we’re able to provide flash services or next-day services, whatever works for you. We have a subscription that covers free delivery for a year. It’s called FreshPass that gives you a couple of other perks and discounts as well.

So, when it comes to nutrition, we can really make it easy. I mentioned our online digital meal planner. So, I’ll drop what a typical experience looks like for me. I’m a busy mom and a professional, so I love our meal plan. I frequently will add about four meals per week to our meal plan, and sometimes I can just import a URL from a website of a recipe that I like or I can scan a page in a cookbook that I like. And then the app actually breaks it down into an actual shopping order. And I’m able to drop it in to the cart, get it paid, and get it delivered. Typically, that’s my routine on a Sunday. So, that makes me feel good as a parent, being able to provide healthy options that we can all tag team and cook at night. And it’s easy for me because delivery makes it easy. And this type of recipe breakdown and fulfillment makes it easy.

Dr. Sandi: That is really important and because so many people are busy and it could be an obstacle. My daughter for example has twins. They’re toddlers, two-year-olds. And she can’t go to the grocery store with them. It’s an outing, it’s an ordeal, and she also works full-time. And so they rely on those delivery services for their grocery needs because it’s a lifesaver. Otherwise, it would be very challenging to find time to go to the store and I think… And I’ve also had people who might have other challenges where it’s not easy to get out and get to a store. So, I love seeing how convenient this is and that you’re working with those services.

In fact, there’s even a medical practice. It’s a digital practice of functional medicine that’s around the country, and they are connected with these services. Instacart I believe is what they use. And the functional medicine doctor and the nutrition professional and the health coach work together on a team, and then they create the optimal meal plan. And then they work with Instacart and work with outlets such as Albertsons to have those groceries sent. And so it’s a great way for everybody working together collaboratively. And retail being involved in that as well.

This has been a fascinating conversation. It is really exciting to see what is happening in retail. Irina, where can people learn more?

Irina: You can go to any of our banner apps. So, Sandra, for you, if it’s Jewel-Osco, you can download our banner app and look for a small health or pharmacy icon and create an account that way and then start earning coupons and points. And I’ll send you a few links as well that you can include in the podcast.

Dr. Sandi: All right. Well, we will include those in the show notes. Actually, one other thing. I just have to say on a personal note. So, I love to walk and I love to walk outside every day. My husband does not, but the only that will get him to walk, he walks around stores. So, often at night he’ll go out to Jewel because he needs something and he’s, “Oh, I already got my steps in.” And he just walks up and down those aisles. So, with these big stores, it actually serves double duty, so you’re shopping but you’re also getting movement in what so many people need as well. But, Irina, thank you so much, and I will look forward to hearing more good things that you are doing to promote health and wellness within Albertsons. Thank you for being with us.

Irina: I appreciate it.