With so many different apps and gadgets springing up around the supermarket industry, it’s only appropriate that we get this, an interactive map detailing just about anything you’d care to know about food availability, our eating habits, and how depressingly obese we’ve become.

It’s called Your Food Environment Atlas, and it’s courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Obama administration’s drive to get Americans — and especially kids — eating healthier. Earlier this month Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move, a nationwide effort to increase availability of healthful foods for kids, and to get them exercising more. The administration also announced it plans to spend $400 million to help eliminate food deserts.

The new food atlas is incredibly detailed, and that makes it a fun, useful tool for consumers and food industry insiders alike. Go ahead, play around with it for a while. Want to know what U.S. county eats the most pounds of fruits and vegetables? How about the regions with the highest density of fast food restaurants? I was interested to see the distribution of farms that sell directly to consumers.

Other than being a diversion when things get slow at work, the USDA’s atlas is a definitive guide in the drive to make America healthier. That might sound overblown, but information is power, and this much information can go a long way. The food industry has stated time and again its commitment to helping people lead healthy lives. Well, now they have a good idea of what they’re up against.

Most of the attention at food shows goes to the fun, “around the plate” foods like chocolates and cheeses, teas and olive oils. “Center of the plate” offerings are usually few and far between. But this year, I am already noticing a handful of companies offering items that answer the daily question, “What’s for dinner?”

One company in particular caught my eye and piqued my interest with its steamable, sustainable seafood entrees like Japanese Black Sesame Wild Ahi Tuna, Veracruz Style Tilapia and Wasabi Ginger Wild Salmon. These are not your chemical-feast TV dinners of yore; instead, they are all-natural, flavorful meals with seafood as the protein of choice. These products were in trays, but more and more steamable meals are popping up in grocers’ freezers in bags that perform the same function.

Another company out of the Chicagoland area is producing restaurant-quality meals much like you can find in high-end European retailers like Picard in France. They are starting with high-quality ingredients to produce an upscale meal — also in a steam bag — that you would be proud to serve to your family and friends.

Interestingly enough, this steamable technology cropped up first in private label offerings from Europe before it was adopted by frozen vegetable producers. The frozen veggie manufacturers have been on board with steam-in-the-bag offerings for the past few years now, so it’s a natural transition that the entrée manufacturers would follow suit. Now that most households in America cannot “cook” without a microwave, we’re seeing new item introductions with microwave-only instructions. The day of the dual microwave or oven tray seems to be a thing of the past. more

Almost every supermarket website I’ve seen includes a page devoted to wellness. The depth and breadth of the information presented varies from chain to chain, but at the very least, there are sections that focus on gluten intolerance, diabetes and dieting — kind of the holy trinity of supermarket whole health marketing.

As the wellness movement has gained momentum, retailers are beefing up their online offerings, too. They add advice and columns from their dietitians; or they might work with a third-party provider like Aisle7 to really develop an information library that can be customized and updated.

I mention all this because a new survey out shows that more than half of Americans looked up health information on the internet last year. The poll of more than 7-thousand adults ages 18 to 64 was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As the percentage of adults in the U.S. who use the internet continues to grow, the internet may become increasingly important as a source of health information for consumers,” stated the center. more

It’s no secret that the snack food market isn’t just about greasy potato chips and candy bars anymore. With the growth of the natural and better-for-you industries, people now have the option of choosing pita chips, fruit-and-nut bars, and other baked, low-sodium, all-natural versions of the munchies they love.

Supermarket checkout aisles have seen the change as $4 organic chocolate bars compete alongside Milky Ways, and now there’s another platform for this next generation of snack foods.

Healthy vending machines — sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what folks are calling the new outposts cropping up at hospitals, college campuses and health clubs across the country. Capitalizing off consumers’ desire to eat better without sacrificing snacking, companies have come out with eye-catching new machines that hold products like 100% juice, dried fruit and rice cakes. There are also organic and all-natural varieties of indulgent favorites, too, like sandwich cookies and gummi bears.

So maybe “healthy” doesn’t apply across the board, since sugar and calories can still be found en masse in some products. But hey, that’s the business these days. Putting apples and oranges behind Plexiglas isn’t going to generate sales, and it won’t drive awareness. You have to meet consumers half way.

And sales have been good lately for companies like Vend Natural, based in Ventura, California. Formerly involved in the traditional vending industry, president Gil Sanchez made the transition a couple years ago and now has more than 350 machines across the country. more

I first saw health kits during a store tour of Ukrop’s Super Markets in Richmond, Va. Bobby Ukrop, the CEO, told me the chain was going to start offering five genetic testing kits, which would indicate a person’s predisposition to heart disease, diabetes and similar conditions.

That was 5 years ago — a lifetime in the field of medical technology (and the supermarket business, too. Ukrop’s has been sold to Ahold’s Giant-Carlisle). I don’t know if they’re still offering the kits, but plenty of retailers have implemented such services through their pharmacies and wellness centers. These exams, for a fee that averages around $100, are sent off to independent labs for processing, and the results are meant to be discussed with a physician or someone versed in wellness, like a pharmacist.

The key to these tests is that they are not a diagnosis or even a prediction. “But they are results that can be modified through diet or lifestyle changes,” is what Bobby Ukrop told me back then. The same is true today.

These kinds of test kits will likely get a big leg up in the coming year as NBC’s hit series, “The Biggest Loser”, prepares to use a new health risk assessment tool that identifies the contestant’s disease risk, as well as their “internal age,” life expectancy and estimated preventable medical expenses. more

More than 1.5 billion Americans visited food web sites this year. It’s a tremendous number, with huge implications for the food industry. The statistic, from a poll conducted by our friends at Allrecipes.com, notes that these consumers went through 11 billion pages of food-focused content — everything from recipes to discussion boards to coupon offers.

While that’s an impressive (even intimidating) number, the real hook for retailers comes from another stat. The Allrecipes.com survey found that 43% of home cooks with smart phones “used the device while grocery shopping to look up recipes, create grocery lists, conduct price comparisons and look up coupons.” We’ve reported on retailers that have implemented pretty extensive online coupon programs to take advantage of this trend.

To get a glimpse of the extent of consumer use, Allrecipes determined that page views of its site from a mobile device increased five times the rate of other devices — desktop, laptop and the like — in the past 16 months. In November alone, Allrecipes,com received more than 1 million visits from mobile devices. That’s a lot of people on the move, who still need and want access to information and offers.

Against this rose-pixeled picture, however, we have another report indicating that the industry itself has lagged in applying many consumer-friendly concepts to B-to-B applications, frustrating clients and trade customers. Technomic Inc., which tracks foodservice and restaurants, found wide-ranging complaints within the industry centered on the lack of specific product information, organization and assistance on a majority of vendor websites. more

Food companies have tried their hand at making voluntary changes to the way they market many of their products to children. Now, it looks like regulators are ready to take the reins.

Earlier this week, a working group that included officials from the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and several other federal agencies met in Washington to propose standards for how manufacturers market to kids. According to the group, foods marketed to children “must provide a meaningful contribution to a healthy diet” and should contain limited amounts of sugar, sodium and saturated fat.

Although these standards would be voluntary, they still represent a big step. Indeed, it would be the first time the government has asserted itself in the realm of children’s advertising.

Retailers and manufacturers aren’t too happy with government involvement, especially since, to them, progress has been made. Back in 2006 a group of companies came together and formed the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative. The group assured everyone that they would promote more healthful items and cut back on promoting unhealthful ones. And a report from the Better Business Bureau, the third party organization that’s monitoring the program, says the companies are living up to their promises, having reduced, for example, the amount of sodium in “many soups and canned pastas” by 20% and 30%.

But the coalition’s yardstick doesn’t seem to be what regulators are interested in. Another report from researchers at the University of Arizona asserts that the majority of advertisements from companies in the coalition were, after three years, still for “nutritionally poor” products. Healthy foods, meanwhile, made up less than 1% of all ads. more

You don’t have to tell this analog guy farming is tough. I read Grape of Wrath; I watched Green Acres (how anyone could run a successful farm with Hank Kimball is beyond me). That’s why it’s fascinating to learn that Zynga’s virtual FarmVille game on Facebook currently has more than 72 million players tilling the online soil.

I mean, in a digital world where you can play games that pit you against the Mob, space aliens and even terrorists, how could much fun could harvesting make-believe strawberries be?

The answer is plenty, if the latest numbers are correct. According to various sources, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook. Players purchase land, seeds and equipment, maintain the farm and are responsible for getting crops harvested before they start to wither and die. In some ways, “playing” farmer is just as real as a flesh-and-blood farmer. There are pests to deal with, neighbors to help and crops to harvest. Each fruit and vegetable only stays fresh for a set amount of time before it starts to go bad, so participation requires vigilance and good timing.

The game is two-dimensional, but an awareness campaign launched very recently by the Animal Agriculture Alliance is helping to make farming very real. The group has released a video that depicts what it’s really like helping to feed the masses. more

Apps have been great for the natural foods industry. Long-time wellness consumers are used to creative thinking. I mean, back in the days before online shopping, if there was a natural/organic lifestyler who needed something special, they either did it themselves or tapped into the word-of-mouth network, shopped specialty catalogues or subscribed to newsletters.

Those inspired approaches to filling their pantries is serving them well as mobile technology continues its dizzying expansion. Indeed, a recent app in particular has the potential to satisfy all consumers with real-time data on food recalls. ReachEverywhere, developers of the Shopper iPhone Shopping Assistant application, announced that it is integrating real-time recall information from the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Now, both the FDA and USDA currently offer online access to the information (FDA even has its own app), but this new one promises to take the confusion out of trying to figure out which agency oversees the product in question.

According to my colleague, SN tech editor Michael Garry, “Users of the application who put an item on their list that is associated with a recall will automatically see the warning information for that product.”

In addition, ReachEverywhere, which launched personalized retailer circulars on the Shopper application one month ago, has added weekly circulars from Stop & Shop, Publix, Giant Food and Winn Dixie to the more than 100 existing retailers on the platform.

(Photo credit: Thibault Poix )

As part of an ongoing effort to update the nation’s aging power grid, companies have introduced “smart meters” as a new way to monitor energy levels. What makes them so “smart”? Well, aside from sparing the rhododendrons beneath your old analog meter getting trampled each month by some burly reader, smart meters conserve energy and give consumers feedback and control over their power levels. It’s a digitized, interactive version of your house’s energy system — and it’s all online.

Bear with me here.

It’s pretty clear that these smart meters are — or at least represent — the future of household energy, and manufacturers like General Electric and Whirlpool have jumped on board. GE has started distributing the first ever “smart appliance”, a water heater that links into the smart meter system. Whirlpool, meanwhile, plans to make 1 million “smart dryers” by 2011.

As our appliances get smarter, it stands to reason that food will need to follow suit. If people log on and see, for example, that they’re using way too much energy powering their microwaves, they may buy fewer frozen meals, or perhaps search out foods with shorter cooking times. The transparency, the new levels of information, could very well change the way people think about their food. We’re all concerned with nutrition facts — well, what about “energy facts”?

This is all very hypothetical right now. But it’s not too hard to imagine, especially given people’s growing concern over energy use, carbon footprints and such.

And of course, there’s always the possibility that the smart appliances could become too smart, and end up taking over the world.

(photo courtesy of pasukaru76)