STORES Magazine - March 2009 - (Page 35)

NUTS AND BOLTS / POS What’s for Lunch? System prints nutrition data on back of receipts BY KAREN M. KROLL s anyone who’s stepped inside a grocery store can tell you, the presence of ads and coupons on the backs of customers’ receipts is no recent development. What is new, however, is the ability to tailor a message to each customer based on her purchase. A The application from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Nutricate enables merchants to provide the nutritional content of the Caesar salad or cheeseburger she just bought. It prints a breakdown of calories, fat, fiber and protein for each item ordered, and adjusts the figures to account for any changes the customer makes. If she decides to skip the mayo on her turkey sandwich, for instance, Nutricate will subtract 110 calories and four grams of fat from the total. The system also offers quizzes and nutritional tips that can be included on the receipts, says Mike VanDemark, account manager with NCR, one of the leading manuNutricate coupon facturers of double-sided redemption rate printers. Jay Ferro, founding partner and CEO of Nutricate, got his start in the restaurant industry shortly after graduating from the University of California-Santa Barbara: He founded Silvergreens, a restaurant serving madefrom-scratch soups, sandwiches and burgers, in 1994. Almost from the start, Ferro searched for a means to provide customers with nutrition information about their orders. Pre-printed brochures would be- 4-5% come outdated as offerings and ingredients changed; websites are more easily updated, but customers typically have to review the information before arriving at the restaurant. Ferro settled on the notion of putting this data on the backs of receipts. That way, customers would have the information as soon as they ordered, and it would be easy for the restaurant to update the data via the web. He developed and completed the patent process for what would later become the Nutricate system. The market for applications providing nutrition data still was emerging in the mid-1990s, however. Restaurants were exempt from the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which focused on packaged foods. What’s more, “it was the era of super-sizing,” Ferro notes, as many fast-food outlets tried to one-up each other with gargantuan menu items. The mood had shifted by 2004. Americans were eating out more than ever, and concerns about obesity were growing. That prompted growing interest in having restaurants provide nutritional information about the dishes they served. So Ferro left Silvergreens, dusted off his business plan and founded Nutricate. STORES / MARCH 2009 35 WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - March 2009

STORES Magazine - March 2009 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Movers and Spenders What Shoppers Think Take Your Laundry Online 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Luxury for Less Q & A CONCEPT2WATCH Checkout Management Online Entrepreneurs Sustainability POS Online Strategy Online Scheduling SaaS Online Marketing Merchandise Security PCI Compliance LPinformation Supplier Directory Exception Reporting Industry Perspective Theft Research LOEB Retail Letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar End Cap

STORES Magazine - March 2009

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