At Kroger Wellness Festival, Advantage’s Andrea Young and Olympian Laurie Hernandez to speak on inclusion

Andrea Young, chief operating officer for experiential services at Advantage Solutions, knows a thing or two about the power of being one's authentic self.

As the company's first openly LGBTQ+ executive leader, Young was a founding member of the company's diversity, equity and inclusion board in 2020. Years earlier, upon her hire, she helped to expand benefits for same-sex couples at the company. A former college basketball player, Young played for Rice University on a scholarship at a time when few women college athletes received scholarships.

Throughout her life and career, Young has broken through barriers, creating opportunities for others who might be marginalized or disenfranchised.

This week at the Kroger Wellness Festival, which draws 200,000-plus attendees and is produced by Young's team at Advantage Solutions, she'll host a conversation about inclusion with Laurie Hernandez, a trailblazing Latina gymnast who won gold and silver medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

In a recent interview, Young talked about the power of the Kroger Wellness Festival, and what it means to her to be on the panel with Hernandez.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What do you love about the Kroger Wellness Festival, having been there and experienced it before?

A. It is literally the best part of what we do at Advantage. And I don't mean it's the best business or it's the best program. I mean, what we do better than anyone in industry, I believe, is solve and help - help customers or clients, and solve new problems.

Six years ago, Kroger Health came to us as an experiential team. Kroger Health is part of the Kroger company, and they wanted to change the way that America eats, and they wanted America to look at food as medicine. And as a health company that owns thousands of pharmacies, they made a strategic commitment to write fewer prescriptions. And they came to us and said, 'We need ideas on how to bring a wellness platform to life.'

It started as this tiny little event with probably 20 vendors and sponsors, and we activated by giving out information and samples inside the Cincinnati Convention Center on a Friday afternoon.

Advantage's Gil Phipps and Andrea Young with CEO Dave Peacock (center) at last year's Kroger Wellness Festival

Fast-forward to this year's festival, and we'll have 176 brands that are sponsoring, we will have six performance stages, two concerts, and two and a half days of content from thought partners and influencers across industry to promote community wellness. This will mark the third year that we are the central production and promotion partner that puts the entire thing together.

We went from one conversation six years ago to this major event in partnership with one of the largest grocery retailers in the United States. It's one of the proudest things I've ever done at this company.

Q. At this year's Kroger Wellness Festival, you'll be on a panel about inclusion with Laurie Hernandez. How did this come to be?
A. We focus every year on the central initiative around wellness and community building. That's always our principle. But then there's always this undertone of care. And Kroger has really upped its commitment to belonging and impact and its DEI efforts, as has Advantage and our partners at Kroger Health.

And so as we were putting together the agenda and the panels for this year, the head of Kroger Health said to me: 'You're fiercely committed to inclusion. Advantage is fiercely committed to inclusion, yeah? And we feel like this panel, in addition to you being a female college athlete way back in the day, is a perfect confluence of your passions and the work that we've done together, and we would love for you to host it.'

Q. How excited are you to meet and talk with Laurie Hernandez?

A. Laurie Hernandez is a change agent. She broke new ground. She broke through a glass ceiling. She was willing to put herself in positions that you know were unique and in doing so, she created opportunity for those behind her. And in my own way, with the support of a great team, I believe I've done that here. And the executives at Kroger who know me and know my journey, that's what they saw.

Q. Why is inclusion so important to you personally?

A. I've been married to my partner, Lisa, for 27 years. When I came to Advantage 14 years ago, our Southern California-based company of 30,000 people did not have domestic partner or same sex benefits. (Editor's note: Today, more than 70,000 people work at Advantage, which is now headquartered in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Clayton.)

I insisted that the policy be adopted for the company as a condition of my hire. And it took two years for it to happen, but two years later, we had domestic partner benefits. And now we have same-sex partner policy benefits. And I felt it was important to make sure that families that looked like mine - whether they were openly identifying themselves within the Advantage ecosystem or not - that they had the opportunity and privilege to feel as safe as an employee of the company as every other type of family.

I believe if you can bring your authentic self to work, then you can bring stronger diversity of thought, stronger leadership, stronger collaboration. And so that that's why the idea of inclusion has such personal resonance with me. The more that you create opportunity for people to do things beyond what they might even believe they're capable of - the better organization you create.

Q. What has our company's DEI journey looked like from your perspective?

A. We put a voice to our DEI commitment for the first time ever in May of 2020, and the thing that was the most successful in the first two-plus years of launching our DEI board was our employee resource groups, which galvanized our teammates more than anything I've ever seen in my 14 years at the company.

Andrea Young meeting Peloton instructor Alex Toussaint at the 2023 Kroger Wellness Festival.

And those employee resource groups created influence networks, mentorship and just communities for people to feel a part of. We created space for there to be open, courageous conversations around gender and ethnic diversity, which we were lacking, and we opened the conversation and created safe space for sexual identification, as well as empowering uniquely abled teammates to have a voice and a space at the company.

We're proud to have such amazing champions across our ERGs. We're taking those efforts even further by operating with a purpose to enrich lives, partnering with organizations that share those values and deepening our commitment through our dedicated Belonging and Impact team.

And I couldn't be more excited about where we're headed.

Q. When you're at the Kroger Wellness Festival, surrounded by thousands of people committed to wellness and positive community, how does it make you feel?

A. Incredibly proud of our team. What they pull off in this four-day period is incredible. And I just feel very grateful for the opportunity, particularly like this conversation about inclusion, to be able to have a platform to share stories and motivate people. It's an incredible gift to be able to do that as part of my day job.

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