Kraft pledges to make more healthful foods and end marketing to schools

Food & Drink Weekly, July 7, 2003

Kraft Foods Inc. announced plans to revamp its food products to make them healthier -- and, in some cases, smaller in portion size -- to address concerns about obesity, particularly among children. Kraft also said it will no longer market its products in schools and will try to limit sales of certain products in school vending machines.

Kraft said it was responding to rising obesity rates around the world. "We recognize we have a role to play since food is part of the equation," said Kraft spokesman Michael Mudd. "Kraft wants to be part of the solution."

Any solution might be slow in coming. Kraft is still assembling an advisory council that will ultimately recommend appropriate single-portion sizes as well as sugar, fat and caloric content for the targeted Kraft products. The recommendations will not be implemented until the beginning of 2004 and are to be phased in over three years.

Attorneys who successfully sued tobacco firms have made it clear that their next targets include food firms, although, so far, their attempts -- such as a lawsuit by overweight teenagers who blamed McDonald's Corp. for their obesity -- have been unsuccessful. Kraft was also the target of litigation in May, when a San Francisco lawyer tried to block the company from selling Oreo cookies to children in California. That lawsuit has been dropped.

Meanwhile, several states and cities, most recently San Francisco, have banned the sale of soda, candy and other junk food in schools.

To implement its healthier food program, Kraft said it will appoint an advisory council of experts in nutrition, exercise, human behavior, public health and youth marketing to draw up nutritional guidelines for all its products. Those guidelines will cover calories, fat, cholesterol, sugar and sodium and will be used to help the company develop new products as well as reformulate any products that don't meet the guidelines.

The advisory council will also determine what is an appropriate serving size for products that are packaged and sold to be consumed in a single sitting. "If we exceed those levels, we will reduce the product size," Mudd said. Any product that is reduced in size will be priced competitively, Mudd added.

In no longer marketing to schools, Kraft will eliminate its promotions, abandon its free posters and colorful book covers and end contests, such as Oscar Mayer's popular School House Jam in which schools compete for up to $15,000 by singing an interpretation of Oscar Mayer jingles.

Julie Walsh, a registered dietician and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said none of these changes will make a difference unless people change their eating habits. "We already have a lot of healthy foods available," Walsh said. "But Americans don't buy and eat those."