Big Food’s Aisles of Excess
For the last year, the packaged food industry has been getting a good old-fashioned cuffing. Faced with the grim medical realities of rising rates of obesity, parents have forced school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, to ban soft drinks. Politicians in Sacramento and elsewhere have been legislating furiously to ban snack foods in schools, too. Even the Bush administration has gotten into the act.
Yet until recently, the response of Big Food has been largely defensive: It denied the problem even existed.
That changed this month when Kraft Foods Inc., the world’s No. 1 purveyor of macaroni and cheese and the like, announced a wide-ranging series of anti-obesity initiatives: smaller individual portion sizes, an end to marketing in public schools, even reformulation of some of its more egregious artery-cloggers. Other jumbo companies are bound to follow in its path.
But if Big Food is serious about the nation’s health, it needs to end the anti-competitive practices that helped give rise to the supermarket sameness at the core of today’s troubling dietary patterns.
Walk down the aisles of any supermarket and you’ll see that fatty, sugary snack foods dominate the shelves. A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that, since the late 1970s, the annual number of new products introduced into the U.S. food market classified as “condiments, candy, snacks and bakery foods” has risen sixfold, from about 400 a year to about 2,400 a year. During the same period, the prevalence of being overweight rose from about 40% to more than 60%. Big Food understands the very human -- and historically healthy -- drive for dietary novelty, and has turned it into something extremely unhealthy.
Companies like Kraft and General Mills also understand the need to dominate supermarket aisles. They want their products on the shelves, and they want them prominently displayed. Some companies go so far as to pay “slotting fees” to markets in order to get their products on the shelves and, in some cases, to get them prominently placed. Slotting doesn’t come cheap. Getting products into a small regional chain runs about $25,000. A national buy can cost upward of $500,000.
Although the food industry claims to hate the practice, manufacturers nevertheless pony up about $9 billion a year in such fees. This is because they know that the high costs help prevent less well-endowed upstarts from challenging their shelf position. A 2000 investigation by Congress’ General Accounting Office, instigated by the Senate Committee on Small Business, also found that slotting fees were being used by some manufacturers to push competing products off nearby shelves. When the committee called on Big Food to open its books to settle the matter, most companies refused, inviting heated words from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Kraft claims it does not use slotting fees per se, but with an $850-million promotional budget, it pays supermarkets generously to promote its new products. As Forbes magazine approvingly noted last year, “Kraft needn’t bully retailers when they can win them over with consumer insights and marketing advice. Grocers are listening, and in many cases they hand Kraft the keys to the storeroom, giving it the power to make decisions about product placement, promotions and pricing -- not only for its own category-dominating brands but also for those of its competitors.” No wonder that out of 15,000 food makers, just 20 now account for 54% of checkout sales. No wonder that there are now four different cartoon-based versions of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. We eat, to a large extent, what Big Food tells us we should, and that’s frightening.
That’s a lot to lay off on a box of mac and cheese, perhaps. Yet no one should underestimate the clout that Kraft, with its $2.1 billion in assets, possesses to forge the kind of change in our food supply that we need. It could embark, for example, on a mission to encourage its suppliers to use a wider range of foods. This, in turn, might stimulate U.S. agriculture to modulate its dependence on corn and soybeans and the limited palette of products made from them. Kraft might also rethink its de facto capitulation to the anti-competitive forces of slotting and symbiotic marketing.
Kraft and the other Big Food companies could also afford to ratchet down the more insidious of their marketing methods. With their endless blitz of blue Gogurt or Rugrats Macaroni & Cheese, companies like Kraft and General Mills use food as entertainment to subvert the traditional parental role of food monitor.
Of course, there are some things we don’t need Big Food to help us sort out. One of them is reclaiming two words that have been all but forgotten in today’s consumer culture: “That’s enough.” They are words no corporation can reasonably be expected to speak with any conviction.
Only consumers can speak those words, and we can begin at the supermarket, when we decide what to toss into that burgeoning shopping cart in the first place.
