By Ginny Hair,
Founder & Principal, Echo Communications
Like many of you, we’ve been fans of the Canned Food Alliance (CFA) for years. And when it comes to advocating for health and nutrition, and including canned foods as an important part of that conversation, the CFA has inspired so many of us to think “inside the can.”
For the past 23 years, we at Echo Communications have made it our mission to promote family growers and farmers, processors and school nutrition programs, commodity boards and retailers, as well as like-minded organizations who believe in “all forms count” and the restorative power of whole foods. So it is with great excitement and enthusiasm that we’ve partnered this year with the CFA to help them formalize their partnerships with select supermarket dietitians to increase the sales of nutritious canned foods year-round.
While many of us think about canned foods during Canned Food Month and National Nutrition Month, we believe that canned foods make great sense (and cents!) 24/7/365, and we are working hand-in-hand with Fareway, Niemann Foods, Wegman’s and Weis, to name a few, to keep that message going all year. From recipes to infographics, ready-to-use tweets to tips on canned food usage, we are leveraging the CFA’s wonderful resources and getting them to the influencers who can use them most.
Additionally, the Agency is creating new materials to help tell the full spectrum of the canned food story, including the role canned foods play in keeping our planet green. For April and Earth Day, we created this piece that our supermarket RDs and other partners used in their communications to help tell the sustainability story of cans (see below). The new materials join an already impressive catalog of communication tools available to you for free at Mealtime.org
And for May, we’re partnering with supermarket RDs to promote the ways in which canned foods fit with Mediterranean cuisine and Cinco de Mayo. For next month’s newsletter, we’ve asked nutrition leader, Sylvia Klinger, to share her thoughts on these themes with all of you and cannot wait to see what she comes up with.
So if you’re reading this and thinking, “Hey! I’m a supermarket RD or I know a Supermarket RD that ought to be a part of this program,” or if you want to obtain resources to help communicate the benefits of “all forms,” give us a shout! We would love to hear from you and see how we can work together to bring convenient nutrition to all Americans. Or, if you are already using our materials or would like to discuss new opportunities, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or Katie Toulouse at [email protected]. We are incredibly honored and thrilled to be working with the CFA and know that if we all work together, only good things will come!
