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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Grocers are cementing roles as key health care players, according to a white paper from Placer.ai.
In-store clinics are central to the transition, according to the report, titled “The Healthcare Opportunity in Grocery.”
Clinics are transforming supermarkets into “hubs for both food and wellness,” says the paper. “While grocery stores have long featured pharmacies and some basic health care services like vaccinations,” it says recent years have seen a shift towards more extensive offerings.
“Today, many grocery stores offer a range of services — from primary and urgent care to dental and mental health care. In addition to providing an important community service, grocery-anchored health care clinics can boost foot traffic at chains, help health providers reach more patients, and allow shoppers to manage their health and home needs in one convenient trip.”
Analyzing foot traffic to supermarkets with and without in-store clinics shows their positive impact. Across chains, locations with clinics drew more visits in the first half of 2024 than their chains averaged overall.
For Kroger, for example, the eight Dillons locations with The Little Clinic saw, on average, 93% more visits per location than the banner-wide average. Kroger’s Jay C Food Stores, which has two in-store clinics, saw visits to these venues outpace the chainwide average by 92.9%. For both chains, relatively small overall footprints may contribute to the differences: Jay C operates just 22 locations, all in Indiana, while Kansas-based Dillons has some 64 locations.
But similar patterns, if somewhat less pronounced, could be observed at Kroger (up 43%), Fry’s (up 19.2%) and King Soopers (up 16.5%), as well as at San Antonio, Texas-based H-E-B (up 14.5%), which boasts its own growing network of in-store clinics.
H-E-B Wellness, which includes about a dozen primary care clinics, many of them inside stores, was launched in 2022. H-E-B supermarkets with the clinics are helping to reinforce the grocer’s role as a convenient one-stop shop allowing nearby residents to drop in for both daily grocery and wellness needs, the report notes.
“H-E-B has always placed a premium on community, stepping up to help local residents in times of need,” the paper says. “And though the chain as a whole draws an overwhelming majority of its visitors from nearby areas, those with clinics do so even more effectively. In the first six months of this year, some 83.6% of visitors to H-E-B came from less than 10 miles away. But for locations with primary care clinics, this share increased to 88%.
“This suggests that wellness services are particularly appealing to nearby residents, strengthening H-E-B’s connection with local consumers even further,” says the report. “And for a grocery store centered on community engagement, the integration of health services into its offerings is proving to be a winning strategy.”
“As grocery stores lean into health care, they are transforming into multifaceted hubs that offer both essential health services and everyday shopping needs,” the paper concludes.
