Healthy retail: hints and tips on healthier choices is one of a series of five ILC guides created to help retailers understand the barriers older people may face when shopping.

This guidance on Healthy retail: hints and tips on healthier choices should take approximately 6 minutes to read. It gives you the basics on why it’s important to make healthier choices, and how everyone can benefit: customers, workers and retailers.

We’ve created this series of guides to help retailers understand how they can respond to an ageing population, and why being inclusive makes commercial sense. Welcoming a wider range of customers and workers opens up new opportunities for businesses.

Everyone’s entitled to a healthy, happy and long life – but the ageing process affects us all differently. Retailers have a key role to play in enabling customers and staff to live healthier, more active later lives. Making shopping environments more accessible supports independence, helps us stay fit, and ensures that people who have a health condition, disability or caring responsibility can maintain access to the products and services they want.

This guide is about how and why retailers can provide healthier choices and alternatives for consumers. It includes some information about why choices matter to health, and why customers can find it confusing or difficult to spot healthier choices. Finally, it lists some ways that retailers can help us all find and create healthier choices. Working together, retailers can benefit from customers who buy products and services that keep us healthy in later life.

ILC has created these guides to help transform the way the retail sector sees and serves older people. We believe that encouraging inclusive shopping spaces is better for everyone, no matter our age or ability.