Supermarket Smarty keeps your shopping cart healthy

February 22, 6:02 PMPhiladelphia Nutrition Examiner
- Margie King

Patricia Tritt of Supermarket Smarty (Courtesy of P. Tritt)

The secret to healthy eating is good planning. It’s important to plan meals in advance, have healthy ingredients and snacks always on hand, and minimize processed and junk food. But a trip to the supermarket can derail the best of intentions, so it’s important to have a list to keep you on track and to avoid impulse buying. Now there’s help organizing a healthy shopping trip with the new Supermarket Smarty.

The ultimate in healthy food shopping lists, the Supermarket Smarty is a laminated foldout shopping guide with 8 pages of helpful suggestions as to what you should be buying. Just check off what you need on the pages with the dry erase marker that comes with the list, add your own items and notes, shop, erase, repeat.

The Supermarket Smarty is the brainchild of Philadelphia area resident, Patricia Tritt, and grew out of her struggle to provide healthier food for herself and her family. A graduate of Penn State University’s undergrad and graduate business programs, Patricia left her market research career with a major firm in Horsham two years ago to raise two sons who are now 6 and 9 years old. At the time, she was trying to improve her own diet to resolve health issues and wanting to help her husband lose weight. She was also noticing how her sons’ behavior was affected by the food they ate.

Educating herself by reading books by health and nutrition experts such as Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Oz, as well as Joy Bauer’s Food Cures, Patricia began to make notes that she could take to the market: what kinds of oil were the healthiest, what foods were good sources of folate and Omega 3 fats. She called it her “nutrition crib sheet,” and it helped her to remember what she had read when she finally got to the supermarket. From her son’s bedtime books, she got the idea to use a dry erase pen on her laminated list to make it re-usable.

The list covers core foods and focuses on a whole foods and plant based diet, although not necessarily vegetarian. Patricia is hoping to offer other versions in the future, perhaps targeted to eating for mood and memory, or a version for diabetics.

Symbols next to various foods indicate good sources of soluble fiber, when to spend more for organic, healthy fats, whole grains, superfoods and more.

Other helpful features of the Supermarket Smarty include:

• magnifying lens to read the small print on packages and ingredient lists
• small pocket for holding coupons
•  weekly meal planner

Launched just one month ago, Supermarket Smarty is available only on its website and business is slowly building. At just $12.95, it’s definitely a guide worth trying to stay on the road to health.