Companies of all sizes today are moving towards offering healthier choices for their employees throughout New York City.
Some companies have gone to extensive lengths to provide employee wellness programs. Such measures include having nutritious foods and beverages in their break rooms, offering onsite exercise facilities, subsidizing health club memberships, and more.
Reebok, being a fitness company, decided it needed to go a step further in supporting a healthy work environment. The company went as far as sponsoring a national survey to understand how well informed consumers are about the food and beverage they consume.
The survey documented the lengths people will go to get their sugar fix, particularly when it comes to soda.

The survey found that many Americans don’t know what they’re consuming – especially when it comes to soda. In one of the more staggering stats, Reebok found that up to 40% cannot name even three ingredients in soda, including water.
Nearly 30% of the respondents said they would rather give up their pinky toe than soda, while 30% also said they would prefer to lose their jobs than kick the soda habit. They’re also willing to publicly embarrass themselves in the name of the can, with three out of five admitting to having belched or farted in public immediately after drinking soda.

The survey encouraged Reebok to remove soda at its global headquarters in Canton, Mass. this spring as part of a wider, drastic cut to products served at the Home of Fitness that contain added sugar.
“The goal for us here at Reebok is simple – to be the very best fitness brand in the world and to inspire everyone who touches our brand – consumers, fans, and employees – to reach their potential. And our mission starts right here, with our own people,” says Matt O’Toole, president of Reebok. “After seeing these survey results and hearing directly from many of our employees here, we felt removing sugary products from our HQ was simply the right thing to do.”
As a fitness company, O’Toole said Reebok knows how important it is to be active, but what people put in their bodies is equally important.
Reebok enlisted the help of its CrossFit One instructor, Austin Malleolo, to remove all of the old vending machines from its campus.

In addition to the removing sodas and sugary beverages, large candy bars, fried foods, white breads and pastas have been removed from the campus and replaced with whole foods such as nuts, fruits and vegetables.

At the beginning of 2015, Reebok issued a bold challenge to the world to “Be More Human” with a campaign that continued the global fitness brand’s mission to change how people perceive and experience fitness.
More than 85% of the company’s 1,000 employees now participate in some form of physical activity on a daily basis at the brand’s campus, which offers countless top-of-the range fitness facilities.
For more information about healthy snack and beverage options for your breakroom, contact your New York City vending partner, Healthy Vending at   to discuss your customized break room solution

Have you noticed more Millennials in the break room lately? If so, be sure there are plenty of snacks available because Millennials love their snacks. A workplace with a lot of Millennials needs a snack-filled break room.

If you happen to notice a lot of Baby Boomers in the break room, be extra sure there are plenty of snacks. Because when it comes to snacking — which is all the rage in the food industry today — Boomers eat ready-to-eat snack food 20 percent more often than Millennials, according to a daily tracking of U.S. consumers snacking habits by NPD group, a research company.

Boomers and Millennials are the two largest population groups.

Millennials overtook Boomers in number in 2015, but both generational groups are large. And both groups love their snacks. Baby Boomers have 1,200 ready-to-eat snacking occasions per year on average, representing a total of 90.4 billion snacking occasions per year, according to NPD. Millennials have about 1,000 snacking occasions per year, representing a total 83.1 billion snacking occasions.

Those are some pretty serious numbers.

The reasons why each of these generational groups snack are as different as their ages. Millennials reach for what is often a grab-and-go snack because they’re hungry. Boomers snack because they don’t want to prepare a big meal, and they eat alone more often than other age groups. Both groups choose their snacks based on taste and craving.

Fruit, chocolate candy/candy bars, and potato chips rank as the top three snack picks for Millennials and Boomers alike.

After the top three choices, the two groups take different paths, with Boomers reaching for nuts and yogurt while Millennials prefer tortilla chips and cookies.

Although Boomers hold the top score over Millennials in the frequency of ready-to-eat snack food consumption, they don’t come close when it comes to the amount of snacks they eat. Youngsters, ages 2 to 17, consume an average of 1,500 snacks per year, outpacing all other age groups.

Healthier snack foods rank highest with kids, particularly with 2- to 5-year olds, ages where parents primarily control what they’re eating. Sweet and savory snacks start to creep up in rank with older kids.

“Millennials gave us food trucks, food raves – what they want is a sense of community and they got that around food… They wake up every morning with the idea ‘you only live once’ (YOLO), so they are driving food trends and we need to be watching carefully what Millennials are eating, because that’s what is creating the trends,” said Phil Lempert, a food marketing and retail expert.

While it’s important to address the needs of all consumers, the Millennials bear special attention since their numbers are growing in New York City and throughout the country.

Jack Koerten, senior analyst at Euromonitor International, another researcher, says Millennials are approaching 44 million consumers in the U.S. and already have a lot of spending power.

“Snacking is an integral part of their week – they’re snacking and they’re snacking often,” Koerten said. Millennnials are even snacking during traditional meal times, unlike other age groups; 16.2% snack at dinner time while 16.6% snack at lunch.

While the differences between the two generations are interesting, snack availability is clearly important when catering to both Boomers and the Millennials in New York City and throughout the country.

For more information about healthy snack and beverage options for your breakroom, contact your New York City vending partner, Healthy Vending at 917.572.3671  to discuss your customized break room solution.

Business owners in New York City need to review the quality of their employees’ wellness every year. This is important because employees are a business’s most important resource. The need is becoming especially important in light of some new statistics about obesity and its related problems.
Government and industry have invested untold billions in fighting obesity since the “Nation At Risk” report by the American Heart Association and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation warned about rising obesity more than a decade ago. After much education and health initiatives, obesity rates managed to level off in 2011. But that progress has been short-lived.
The obesity rate among U.S. adults in 2015 climbed to a new high of 28.0 %, up 2.5 percentage points since 2008. This represents an increase of about 6.1 million U.S. adults who are obese.
These results are based on more than 175,000 interviews conducted each year from 2013 to 2015 and more than 350,000 interviews conducted each year from 2008 to 2012 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.
In addition to the 28.0% who are obese, another 35.6% of adults are classified as overweight, with 34.6% normal weight and 1.8% underweight.
As with obesity, diabetes generally has trended upward since 2008. The rates of both conditions declined slightly in 2011, only to see annual upticks in the years since.
Obesity and diabetes have increased for all races since 2008, though unevenly. Both rates have increased much more among whites than among blacks, Asians and Hispanics. Blacks have the highest obesity rate by far, followed by Hispanics.
Obese adults are about 4.7 times more likely to be diabetic compared with those who are normal weight, a probability that doesn’t vary significantly for individual racial or ethnic groups.
Research has demonstrated that obesity and its associated chronic conditions cost the U.S. economy $153 billion per year in unplanned absenteeism due to poor health.
Obesity affects all elements of well-being, not just physical wellness. It is associated, for example, with lower financial and social well-being. While obesity can diminish overall well-being, the relationship can also work in reverse; high well-being can reduce the chances of being obese. Those who have high well-being in five areas – purpose, social, financial, community and physical – are less likely to be or become obese.

Workplaces can develop interventions targeting the behaviors linked to obesity. While exercise and healthy eating are important factors, others include smoking, depression, food insecurity, not having a safe place to exercise, not having a personal doctor and poor dental habits.
Having an accountability partner who encourages healthy choices and learning new and interesting things daily also deters obesity.
It is also important to recognize those occupations that are most at risk for obesity, including transportation, manufacturing/production and installation/repair workers.
By addressing obesity on all relevant fronts, it is possible to reverse the upward trend and, in turn, decrease diabetes rates as well.
For more information about healthy snack and beverage options, contact your New York City refreshment services provider, Healthy Vending at  (917) 572.3671 to discuss your customized break room solution.