Membership has its privileges, and Calgary’s Community Natural Foods is tapping into that with a newly launched app geared toward unlocking wellness for its customers.

The app, available on Google Play and the Apple app store, caters to health-conscious shoppers and offers users various personalized options for shopping and eating.

“This launch represents a pivotal moment for Community Natural Foods. Since its establishment in 1977, CNF’s mission has been to provide Alberta shoppers with quality natural and organic products,” said Damon Tanzola, Senior VP Real Estate and Health & Wellness with Calgary Co-op and Community Natural Foods, who helped celebrate the app launch at the Crowfoot Centre location on Oct. 17

“Our new membership program an interactive app embodies this commitment by modernizing how we connect with our community.”

Members who sign up on the app unlock bonus cash, games, personalized recipes, health and wellness events and workshops, information on wellness trends and new products, savings and access to the weekly flyer.

“Through this interactive and customer-centric app, we are launching our new membership program. This caters to the needs of today’s health-conscious grocery shopper, empowering them to make informed decisions.”

The new app is part of a series of upgrades happen at Community Natural Foods, including renovations at the 10 Avenue SW and Crowfoot locations.  They also launched a new store in Old Strathcona in Edmonton and have one planned to open in the southeast Calgary community of Seton in the fall of 2025.

They’ve also made investments in a new website, logo and delivery vans to go along with in-store technology and point-of-sale upgrades.

New app dives into the specifics of CNF patrons

Calgary Co-op, the parent company of Community Natural Foods, launched its own app and membership program back in October 2023. The CNF app does bear some resemblance in terms of the architecture, but the content is geared towards the unique Community Natural Foods shopper, according to Matt Penner, Category Management Lead and Manager of E-Commerce for CNF.

“A lot of it was down to market research, the data that we had done with our customers, looking at how our customers shop, how they interact with us, which promotions they like to take advantage of,” he said.

“Really, how do we bring better and more savings to our customers and allow them to shop their lifestyle with us on a day-to-day basis.”

One thing that stands out in the new CNF app is how they’ll use the newsfeed, Penner said. It will be chock full of information, nutrition data on the products, farm stories and more storytelling about the local partners they’ve worked with over the past 45 years.

“That’s a big part of how we’ve gone through the process of developing that content strategy, that we’re showcasing in the app,” Penner said.

Penner said they’ve adopted a lot of things you typically haven’t seen in a natural health-food setting – particularly games, bonus cash and product giveaways.

“I’d say the thing I’m the most excited about is bringing different ways for our customers to save that’s something where we’ve had a lot of system limitations,” he said.

“We’ve just redone our point-of-sale systems, and so these unlock a number of ways for us to allow consumers to interact with us differently.”

To celebrate the launch of the membership program and app, CNF will be rewarding customers who download the app with $5 in community bonus cash.

Community Natural Foods has more than 10,000 products available in-store, with 7,000 available online. Visit them at communitynaturalfoods.com.