Be honest: If someone came up to you in the grocery store, handed you a box of cereal, and asked you to explain its nutrition fact labels to them (yes, including what the daily value percentages mean), could you do it?

With so many numbers and measurements of fats, fibers, and sugars, and vitamins A through Zinc, food labels are “impossible to understand,” requiring “an enormous amount of sophistication” to read properly, per Marion Nestle, a food-policy expert and a retired professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University.

“That’s why there’s so much interest now in some simple symbol that will tell people at a glance, ‘Buy this,’ or ‘Don’t buy this,’” she told us.

That symbol she’s talking about is coming from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which late last month, proposed an updated definition for use of the word “healthy” on food packaging and said it’s working on a “healthy” product seal.

The FDA says it’s an effort to help Americans improve their nutrition and avoid chronic diseases, but how much will this kind of change move the needle with consumers?

Brain food: With the new changes, if even a small segment of more engaged consumers swap out a few of their typical groceries for those with “healthy” labels every trip, that’s “a lot of behavioral change” over the course or a month or a year, Charles Lindsey, a consumer behavior expert and associate professor of marketing at University at Buffalo, argued.

“Really little small tweaks like that can really make a big difference in terms of our behaviors,” he told us. “If you’re talking about from a public-health standpoint, if you’re talking over millions and millions, tens of millions of people—yeah, some people aren’t going to pay attention, but others will.”

Keep reading here.—EC

Intimate apparel brand Adore Me wasn’t founded with sustainability in mind. And the brand didn’t start thinking about its environmental footprint until 2019, when it was worth over $100 million in revenue. When it did begin to think about going green, it faced an unexpected challenge.

“We’ve had…messaging around sustainability and sometimes the responses are neutral, and sometimes the responses from our customers are actually negative,” Adore Me’s VP of innovation Camille Kress told Retail Brew. “[Adore Me customers] don’t care and they actually reject it because they think sustainability is out of reach. It means expensive. It means not inclusive.”

Despite the early backlash, in August, Adore Me became the only US lingerie brand to become a Certified B Corporation—a designation that measures a company’s environmental and social impact. And the brand is hoping this certification will be better received than prior sustainability messaging.

Looking ahead: Adore Me, which published its first ESG report this year, now uses an internal ranking system—the Adore Me Impact Matrix—to determine the footprint of each individual SKU.

The 12–24 month lead times in the lingerie industry make overnight change extremely difficult, VP of strategy Ranjan Roy explained, but by 2025, all new Adore Me styles will be sustainable based on its internal rating system.

Long game: Adore Me’s consumers might not be sold on sustainable styles, but their preferences aren’t the only consideration, Roy explained.

“In some ways it’s risk management,” he told Retail Brew. “Regulation will come in and policymakers will step in…and we want to be well ahead of the game when that comes.”

Keep reading here.—MA

Today’s top retail reads.

’Sho me the money: How Meesho, an online retailer in India backed by Meta, became the most downloaded shopping app for the first half of this year. (the Wall Street Journal)

Containment strategy: Knowing Gen Z are not likely to be at Tupperware parties, the 76-year-old food-storage brand hopes to connect with them at Target. (CNN)

Single malt-ernative reality: While Britain’s economy founders, a bright spot is scotch whisky, with exports surging. “Overall, if you look at the last two to three years, we’ve just been going through an incredibly buoyant time,” said Rupert Patrick, chief executive of Scottish brand James Eadie. (the New York Times)

Learn: Retail success is a numbers game—but we’ve got a cheat code. The Brew’s Financial Forecasting course teaches you how to create a budget that lasts. Lock in your seat now.

At the mall, it’s where band tees are the only tees. In Retail Brew, it’s where we invite readers to weigh in on a trending retail topic.

The secondary market for luxury watches is flooded with inventory, meaning you could get a mega deal on that used Omega you’ve had your eye on.

• Prices for used Rolex and Patek Philippe watches both were down 8% in Q3 from Q2, according to Morgan Stanley and WatchCharts data cited in Bloomberg.
• Vacheron Constantin and Omega watches were both down 5%.

Some may have offloaded those watches because they’ve become more attached to their Apple Watch (or other smartwatch), of course.

But then again, who says you have to choose?

While some jet-setters have always worn two watches—“double wristing,” in watch-nerd parlance—to keep track of different time zones, the practice these days sometimes entails wearing a smartwatch on one wrist and a traditional watch on the other. (Double pocketing, where you tuck an iPhone in one pocket and a rotary phone in the other, has had a considerably lower adoption rate.)

You tell us: What’s your deal with watches?

Circling back. Last week, we asked you about plans by Kroger, the second-largest US grocery company, to acquire Albertsons, the fourth largest. While Kroger claims the deal will mean lower prices for shoppers, some consumer advocates oppose it because they say it will mean the opposite.

Most of you negged, with 50.6% saying no, you didn’t want Kroger to acquire Albertsons, while 42% wanted the acquisition to happen. Just 7.4% of you didn’t know or didn’t have an opinion (probably because you were too focused on getting all the barcodes scanned in self-checkout).

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• Ride-along: What one DHL drive thinks of the carrier’s electric-vehicle fleet
• Luxury fashion’s love affair with outdoor sports is going strong
• How The North Face created its latest circular-design product