Update: The numerical healthiness results of this web scrape use different (slightly outdated) methodology than my more in depth paper, which is why the healthiness vs unhealthy ratio here is too low.
In the last year, I’ve become more and more curious about what people eat, and what they think they are eating. When you go to a fancy supermarket showing images of healthy people eating spinach and fresh fish swimming in pristine clear water, does this translate to the healthiness of foods being offered?
To look into a consumer perceptions of food healthiness at different supermarkets, I scraped web data from Whole Foods and Safeway. This gave me a large dataset of products (~7,000 products each), and their composition and estimated nutrition. Then, I surveyed 140 people’s opinion on what they thought about the two supermarket’s healthiness. Respondents rated Whole Foods’ healthiness more favorably than Safeway’s (3.60 versus 2.89 on Likert scale, 5= healthiest, p<0.001). When asked to choose which is healthier, 60.4% perceived Whole Foods to be healthier than Safeway, while the rest responded “no difference” (p<0.015).
In order to compare my survey to objective data, the next step was to quantitatively assess the nutrition of thousands of products the two supermarkets actually sell people.
Based on the large web scraped data, the opposite of the consumers perceptions were true. A greater proportion of the Whole Foods store products were not healthy (4,451 items, or 55%) than healthy. I was really surprised, and these results made me more curious about the healthfulness of more budget grocery retailers. I am currently analysis the nutritional value of Safeway, as of April 2026.
Despite Whole Foods’ favorable perception as a healthier grocery store option, analysis of the nutritional value of the products in the stores, being offered to you, reveal a disconnect between consumers’ perceptions of Whole Foods’ healthiness and Whole Foods’ objective nutritional value.
This work has since been published as an abstract in the Circulation journal, and was selected for public presentation at the 2025 American Heart Association meeting.
You can read more here: Circulation: Shopper Beliefs and Product Nutrition and you can download the full abstract with more data here.
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