The Evolved Eater by Nick Taranto

Author:Nick Taranto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

How Big Food Manufactures Health Claims

Big Food marketing power becomes clear when you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent advertising products every year. A few examples:

1. McDonald’s spent $115 million just to market Happy Meals.13

2. General Mills spent $73.7 million advertising Honey Nut Cheerios, $29 million for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and $12.6 million on Lucky Charms.14

3. Frito-Lay spent almost $150 million advertising Cheetos, Doritos, and other chips.15

These are astronomical sums. But if you are a Big Food marketing executive, there’s one big problem—the ads are blatantly obvious, and they are becoming less effective as potential target customers migrate from TV to mobile and from magazines to social media. Traditional food marketing still gets the message across and drives sales, but there is increasing resistance and skepticism toward advertising, particularly when it involves marketing to children.

Michael Mudd is a former executive vice president of global corporate affairs for Kraft Foods. He retired in 2004. In a 2013 opinion piece for The New York Times, Michael wrote, “I was part of the packaged food and beverage business for more than twenty years. As the national waistline grew, the industry sought refuge in the fact that the obesity epidemic has many causes. It has insistently used that fact to fight off government regulators and justify why it should not have to change what it sells or how it sells it.”16

Big Food often blurs the line between science and marketing. “Objective science” is conducted and then expertly spun into marketing, almost always cloaked by Big Food institutes (e.g., Coca-Cola’s Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, General Mills’ Bell Institute, and Nestlé’s Nutrition Institute). A doctor’s stamp of approval works magic when you have only a fraction of a second to make a buying decision.

As a recent New York Times article on the war between the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup trade groups stated, “academic experts frequently become extensions of corporate lobbying campaigns as rival industries use them to try to inflict damage on their competitors or defend their reputations.”17

With one foot in the world of science and one foot in the world of marketing spin, how is a time-crunched consumer supposed to know which way is up?

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