Loyalty Card Data Still Underutilized for Ensuring Food Safety

“We’re looking into using loyalty card data for this purpose, but we’re not currently doing it at this time,” said Marcy Connor, a spokesperson for the East Coast supermarket chain A&P, which operates more than 100 stores in New York and New Jersey.

Several other major chains did not respond to inquiries; Safeway directed questions to the Food Marketing Institute.

“Industry data suggest that just over half of FMI members have a loyalty card program for their frequent shoppers,” said Hillary Thesmar, PhD, vice president of FMI’s food safety programs. But she did not report any polling or surveys on the specific use of loyalty card programs to facilitate epidemiological investigations of foodborne illness, or to alert customers to recalls of food they have previously purchased.

“Loyalty card programs vary from store to store and depend on the varying privacy agreements between retailer and customer. There are no standard agreements for these programs, and each retailer determines the purpose and scope of their loyalty card program, if they choose to have one,” Dr. Thesmar said. “FMI members use a variety of communication tools to alert their customers in the case of a recall. This varies by retailer and by customer base. Retailers know their customers and know how to communicate with their customers, and that is why a variety of communication tools are utilized by the industry.”

Dr. Thesmar pointed to certain challenges that might make it more difficult for some stores to use their loyalty cards for epidemiological purposes. “Customers often have the option to ‘opt in’ or ‘opt out’ of receiving information from retailers,” she noted. “The current information technology infrastructure is another challenge, and accuracy of data on customers is another.”

Costco, of course, has a huge advantage over most other stores in its participation in foodborne illness outbreak investigations: Every Costco shopper has a membership card. You’re not permitted to enter their warehouse stores without one. Most other grocery chains, however, only offer them to the consumer, with the promise of regular discounts, coupons, and other enticements. Many people do use them—a 2004 survey from Boston University found that 86% of adults carried at least one grocery loyalty card, and 76% of those used it almost every time they shopped. Still, the overall penetration may not be sufficient for the cards to be as useful a tool as they could be.

Some consumers—and some retailers—may worry about privacy issues when loyalty cards are used in this way, but in actual practice, that hasn’t presented an issue so far, said Doug Powell, PhD, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “When they’ve been used to date, epidemiologists have been very careful to make sure they get full buy-in and clear any ethical and privacy concerns with the customers as well as the stores.”

In addition to facilitating investigations, Costco has set an industry standard for recall notifications. Wilson said that the company can generate between 1.3 million and 1.4 million phone calls an hour when notified of a Class 1 recall; the company then follows up with a letter that has “Recall Notice” clearly printed on the envelope so customers don’t toss it as junk mail. “We take this very seriously. If there’s a recall out there, you’re going to get a phone call and a letter from Costco,” Wilson said.

Dr. Powell would like to see more stores use their loyalty cards for food safety purposes. “When it comes to food, there’s all kinds of technology and creativity and marketing that’s put into making us mere mortals buy all sorts of weird things, so it’s nice to see the same technology being used to actually make us safer.”