Kid Food by Bettina Elias Siegel

Author:Bettina Elias Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190862145
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Flexing Muscle in the Marketplace

What the 540 Meals campaign demonstrates is that when parents are a significant part of a company’s customer base, as is the case with McDonald’s, the company has every incentive to pay attention to our concerns. And with social media, it’s never been easier to let corporations know what’s on our minds. Just one viral tweet or Facebook post can make them sit up and take notice, and a viral petition sends an even more powerful message—particularly if, like the 540 Meals petition, it also garners media coverage.

But even just communicating with a company via an old-fashioned letter or email can sometimes make a difference, says Dr. Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut. “In talking to food industry executives, I learned they really did pay attention when parents wrote letters,” she says. “I was surprised at first, but I think people realize that when you take the time to write a letter, it’s important to you. And particularly when they start getting multiple letters about the same issue, they really notice.”

Corporations may be desperate to avoid bad PR, but the flip side is also true: they love looking like the good guy. And that positive reinforcement can set off a beneficial chain reaction. In the UK, for example, the grocery chain Waitrose voluntarily chose in 2018 to stop selling high-caffeine beverages like Red Bull to children under sixteen, garnering a lot of good press in the process. As Dan Parker, the former British ad executive, recounts, “And so the next supermarket thought, ‘Hang on. I can get a good PR day here, too,’ and then others quickly followed.” Within just three months, Waitrose had been joined in its voluntary ban by seven other major grocery chains and one major drugstore chain. “And soon the laggards will be left with no choice, really,” predicts Parker. “They’ll start to look out of step.”

For parents interested in waging any kind of social media campaign against a corporation or industry, here’s my best advice: direct the campaign at just one decision maker or company, and keep your request as specific and narrowly focused as possible. A petition that says, “Processed food manufacturers—stop putting harmful chemicals in your products!” (that’s based on a real example, by the way) will go precisely nowhere. No single company is going to feel the heat of that petition, and even if they wanted to comply with the petitioner’s request, it’s much too vague.

But a petition asking the CEO of Mars, Incorporated to stop using specific artificial food dyes in its M&M’s chocolate candies very clearly puts the spotlight on one company and one practice. Just such a petition, co-launched in 2013 by mom Renee Shutters and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, garnered over 200,000 signatures. That viral response, along with associated media coverage, was at least partly responsible for the company’s decision in early 2016 to remove all artificial food dyes from all of its candies sold in the United States.

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