The customer’ s food religion

The sixth theme of dissatisfaction is related to the variety of ‘food religions’

consumers pursue today. As reported in the case description, the Nutrition Code provides customers with information about the healthfulness of their groceries in relation to the recommendations by the authorities; i.e. the healthfulness of customers’ groceries is compared with the official nutritional recommendations provided by the National Nutrition Council. However, not all customers believe in such recommendations and therefore they follow different nutritional guidelines.

There are also customers that do not eat according to the official recommendations due to, for example, ethical reasons. Thus, from the customer’s point of view, the nutritional basis to which the customers’ groceries are compared is not valid in many cases; what eventually is considered as healthful or the ‘right’ way to eat is to a large extent a matter of dispute.

Also the service only follows the official recommendations for a healthful diet, tens if not hundreds of studies show that this diet makes people ill with for example cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, etc. Why can’t the users themselves choose which levels of macronutrients they want to have in their diet? Therefore the service as it is now is not useful for me at all because the officially healthful diet is not really healthful at all and I don’t want to pursue it in any way.

[anonymous customer feedback]

The diet is wrong because the generally accepted diet in this country is wrong. Meaning that a high-carbohydrate diet is not the right way to go. Potato and grains are not something you should eat as much as you like. This doesn’t take allergies into account either. I wonder why Finns gain more and more weight, well it’s of course because the same wrong diet is imposed on them everywhere.

[anonymous customer feedback]

I’m on a low-carb diet where bread, potato, pasta and rice are cut to a minimum, but vegetables, eggs, fish and meat are used a lot. I use processed transfat (margarins, vegetable oil products, etc.) only minimally but I use a lot of natural fat, meaning butter. And because the Nutrition Code service wants to follow the so-called ‘official dietary recommendations’, my diet is unhealthful. In my opinion and according to the numerous other low-carbers I am on a healthful diet all the same. So who should I believe?

[anonymous customer feedback]

For customers that do not believe in the official nutritional recommendations the information provided by the service is not as beneficial as for others, as highlighted in the above quotations. However, the majority of the customer perceptions were not that radical in the sense of rejecting the whole idea of the service. For example, customers could use some parts of the information provided by the Nutrition Code, and disregard or filter the ‘false’ information resulting from the incompetent food doctrine the service was based on.

Well then one thing for me is that since I’m a vegetarian, it disturbs me a lot that they have those like recommendations for amounts of meat and fish you should eat and so my diet can't fully fall within the recommendations. So of course my grain and vegetable proportions will be bigger percentage-wise because I won’t have any meat products in there.

- Sofia, 21

But then as me and my family are vegetarians, it’s a bit like it doesn’t serve us as well as it could because it assumes that meat is part of your diet.

[… ]

When I said at the beginning that the service gives you a rough idea, I think this is what makes it rough, that it doesn’t give you an exact picture, and maybe it’s like, of course it’s based on one general recommendation and you might easily get the idea at first that it’s like the one and only truly healthful diet, but then when you start thinking about it more closely you realise that it’s been made to fit a specific model and that you can build up a healthful

diet in many different ways. But as far as the vegetarian diet is concerned, these are the only drawbacks I’ve experienced.

-Johanna, 30

[… ] but then there are some things that are matters of principle for me that I won’t, like even if it shows me that the consumption is too low, I won’t change it, like for example we don’t eat meat so I won’t buy it. So it can be on red or too low, it won’t affect me of course.

- Julia, 47

Furthermore, some customers might be obligated to follow a specific diet. These include for instance customers that have inborn food-related health problems that oblige them to avoid certain nutritive substances. For those customers the information provided by the Nutrition Code may not be correct.

Our family is mainly on a strict diet due to gout. The service offers for example good sources for Vitamin B 12, such as liver steaks, liver casserole and Baltic herring. We can’t eat any of those. So it would be great if you could create your personal profile to which you could add or remove foods that you eat or cannot eat. This way you might perhaps get more suitable suggestions on what to get from the store.

[anonymous customer feedback]

The service doesn’t take into account special diets, for example if you have severe lactose intolerance you can’t even drink lactose-free milk. Then it should give you other sources for calcium for example.

[anonymous customer feedback]

Altogether, the information is incorrect because customers follow different recommendations than the one used in the Nutrition Code. However, customers provided suggestions for finding a solution to this problem. As described in the quotations below, providing customers with possibilities in terms of the type of diet the customer is following could enhance the validity of the information and thus, could be better used as input to the customer’s value creation.

[… ] but I’d say that it would be great if the service had the most common diets, so that you could choose that I’m a vegetarian and I use milk and eggs, or I could imagine that if someone’s allergic to citrus fruit or something that when it suggests something, like when there’s a red dot telling you that one of the dietary minerals is missing and then you can

check out the suggestions that show you where you could get that, and well if I get suggestions for pork or beef it doesn’t help me at all because I’d need to know what fits my diet or from which foodstuff I could get it.

- Johanna, 30

I would definitely like to make the service more customisable so that the users themselves could define the desirable proportions of nutrients. Or at least stop comparing the users’

diets to the official dietary recommendations. I myself follow a low-carbohydrate diet which is quite far from the recommendations. It means that I only eat small amounts of foods containing carbohydrate but a lot of fat. Therefore I don’t need any ‘infidel’ guidance for what I should eat. For the most part I would like the service to affirm numerically what I experience through my well-being and to do so in a discreet way without any lecturing.

[anonymous customer feedback]

In comparison with the themes of K-food-store shopping’, ‘Out-of-household consumption’, ‘Same ‘Out-of-household – different diets’, and ‘Seldom bought items’, the source of dissatisfaction was not that the information was not about the customer. Here, similarly with the theme of ‘Not for me’, customers were dissatisfied toward the information because it was not for the customer. In other words, nutritional information that follows the official recommendations by the National Nutrition Council is not relevant for all customers. Customers’ alternative food religions determine the basis to which their groceries’ healthfulness should be compared. Consequently, this basis determines the extent to which the information is valid and therefore useful in their value creation. Now, due to the diversity of customers’ food religions, the information provided by the Nutrition Code can only be used partially, or in some cases, not at all.