Food safety officials are increasingly finding value in plumbing shoppers’ food buying habits through these loyalty cards when they’re faced with food-borne illness outbreaks across communities and even states that seem to have no obvious links.

“It’s very helpful because it’s very hard for people to remember what they ate a couple of days before, not to mention a couple of weeks ago,” says Casey Barton Behravesh, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From this article in USATODAY about using store club cards to track outbreaks.

This is a retroactive analysis, but imagine if we could get stores to combine that with this:

The Medication Check service by CVS (and those of other pharmacies) is great for detecting drug interactions for scripts written by different doctors (or the same dumb one!). This is a valuable service.

With this enhanced Supermarket Card, when you check out, the card could be set to warn you that you are buying something you are allergic to. You would have to tell them you are GF or CF or whatever, but if they let you set a warning preference of “put an asterisk on the receipt” or “Have cashier tell me”, it could help a lot of people avoid being glutened.

They have the technology to give you a Morningstar Farms coupon when you buy a Boca Burger, they can do this. We just have to tell them we want it.

Would you tell your supermarket you were gluten free if it meant you could get this sort of warning?