Meijer Healthy Living

Today Janine Faber, a Meijer Healthy Living Adviser came in to talk with us. She is a dietitian and also has a masters in health promotion and education. She shared her past experience in the nutrition field and how she came to work at Meijer. She gave us a lot of good advice on how to gain experience and sell yourself for a job. She is the dietitian who is in charge of managing Central and Southern Ohio and Louisville and Lexington in Kentucky. The goal of the Meijer Healthy Living program is to increase sales and promote customer loyalty by creating and communicating healthy solutions and product knowledge to shoppers. They hold many community events and in store events, but also make media appearances and publications. These events are funded by sponsorship of companies. Companies may ask them to sponsor a certain product as long as it is nutritious, and then sponsor an event. She also discussed the NuVal scoring method which was really interesting.

There are five dietitians across the midwest who work in the Healthy Living program. I was amazed at all of they events and activities they partake in. They plan programs together and help each other out, but also receive program ideas from corporations, customers, and Meijer management. The programs are monitored and evaluated by participants after each event, but also by Meijer upper management. Events are constantly evolving and becoming better as time goes on. This is a really interesting job for dietitians, and it definitely opened my eyes to another job possibility.

My group also planted all of our plants in our garden, after doing research. The garden looks really nice, and now we just need to keep an eye on things and water the plants. Our group has also been steadily working on our assessment workbook, which is coming along.