Metro's upgraded web, app identifies good food choices

Metro has added new features to its metro.ca website and mobile app, including smiles for good food choices and the ability to scan bar codes with an iPhone to add products to grocery lists.

The smiles, which are part of the My Healthy Plate with Metro healthy eating program, identify good and great food choices in each product category.

Gino Plevano, senior director, digital strategy and platforms at Metro, said the addition of the smiles to the mobile app and website will help users prepare their grocery lists.

It also helps them discover the wide range of healthy eating choices available at the grocer. For example, there are 89 healthy cereal choices posted on the app and online.

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The ability to scan the bar codes also makes it easier and faster to prepare grocery lists, Plevano says. Users suggested the addition of that feature.

Plevano says the My Metro mobile app, which was launched last September, has greatly outperformed expectations. However, he would not provide user numbers.

One month after launch, the number of downloads exceeded the goal that was established for the first three months. Since then, Metro has tripled those results. “We’re very pleased with the download results to date.”

Plevano says My Metro was the most downloaded app in the food and beverage category in Apple Canada’s App store in the weeks following its launch.

“The other matrix we look at is the number of users who update the application.” To date, 70% of users have downloaded the four updates that have been issued since the app was released. “So it’s not an application that people download and then don’t use.”

The websites and apps are similar in Quebec and Ontario. However, Metro has its own metro&moi rewards program in Quebec, while it uses the Air Miles program in Ontario.

Users can synchronize information across the app and the website.

Metro is looking at extending the app to other mobile operating systems, such as Android and Windows. But “we want to put all the features we can on the (iPhone) app before replicating it (elsewhere),” Plevano says.