Staples: Partner Case Studies
Culturally Responsive Care at Work: How Nest & Nurture and Staples Reimagined Corporate Wellness
Executive Summary
Most corporate wellness programs rely on generalized lifestyle advice that fails to engage diverse teams or deliver sustained outcomes. Staples partnered with Nest & Nurture to pilot a culturally responsive nutrition session integrated directly into the workday.
The result: strong engagement, psychological safety, and a scalable model that supports equity, performance, and long-term health cost containment.
The Problem: Why Traditional Wellness Falls Short
Surface-level nutrition tips assume a one-size-fits-all workforce. In reality, many employees — particularly those from racialized, immigrant, and multicultural backgrounds — have been repeatedly told to “cut out” cultural foods in the name of health.
This elimination-based, one-size-fits all approach often leads to disengagement and widening health disparities.
Nutrition is not just a wellness habit. It’s one of the most direct, repeatable ways employees interact with their physiology every day, influencing blood sugar, hormones, stress response, energy, sleep, and focus.
When nutrition guidance ignores culture and lived experience, the downstream effects show up at work as fatigue, brain fog, absenteeism, and reduced performance.
Staples recognized that meaningful wellness must reflect the realities of a diverse, cross-Canadian workforce, and that inclusive care is a business imperative, not a perk.
The Solution: A Human-Centred, Culturally Responsive Approach
The session was intentionally designed to address a key gap in traditional wellness: nutrition guidance that excludes diverse cultural food realities.
Rather than elimination-based, cookie-cutter nutrition advice, the session reframed nutrition through an equitable lens, focusing on outcomes employees feel daily — energy, focus, strength and resilience. Guidance was delivered within cultural food contexts, not in opposition to them.
Key elements included:
Plain-language education on nutrition basics for blood sugar balance and productivity
Practical food strategies that respected diverse cultural ingredients
A flexible and adaptable grocery framework
By emphasizing adaptation over restriction, the session showed how culturally familiar foods can support metabolic and hormone health, reducing disengagement, increasing trust, and driving meaningful participation across a diverse workforce.
Engagement Signal: Psychological Safety in Action
The live Q&A revealed the depth of unmet needs when culturally responsive care is absent. Employees asked nuanced, experience-based questions about nutrition for health and wellbeing.
The quality of engagement signaled psychological safety — employees felt seen, respected, and comfortable discussing real health concerns in a workplace setting.
For leadership, this matters: programs employees trust are programs they actually use.
Early Impact & Measurable Potential
Even as a single-session intervention, early indicators were strong:
High engagement and sustained attention
Immediate clarity around daily food choices and energy management
Clear resonance with culturally inclusive, physiology-informed guidance
At scale, this model supports:
Improved energy, focus, and productivity
Reduced symptom-related absenteeism
Increased uptake of preventative care
Long-term healthcare cost containment through early, inclusive intervention
What Leaders Can Measure
Engagement and session participation rates
Employee-reported energy, focus, and confidence with food
Absenteeism and disability trends related to metabolic and hormone concerns
Utilization of preventative health benefits
Executive Takeaway & CTA
Staples’ leadership demonstrates what’s possible when corporate wellness moves beyond generic advice and addresses real physiology, culture, and lived experience. Culturally responsive, hormone-informed nutrition is not an add-on—it’s a strategic investment in equity, performance, and workforce sustainability.
Built to Scale Across Canada
Nest & Nurture operates with a trained interdisciplinary clinical team across multiple provinces, enabling consistent delivery, regional and cultural adaptability, and expansion into ongoing programs or 1:1 care—without losing the human touch
