Can food marketers shape up?

Shopper Report, The, Jan, 2004 by Mona Doyle

Food marketers who are willing to help stem the obesity epidemic are going to have to get beyond the tools and techniques they learned in the course of their MBA training. Backing off from eat-more promotions is a real challenge. Marketers win by increasing sales through innovations like Frito-Lay's Go-Snacks that make it easier to munch chips as we drive. I see my own mea culpa in long-time advocacy of consumer-friendly packaging that makes it easier and faster to carry, access, store and consume the food and beverages inside. Our success in making food and beverage packages purse, back-pack, desk and car-friendly has made it possible for consumers to eat and drink constantly, and on the go and at home. The industry has upsized whenever it could sell more and downsized only to meet price barriers.

Most of us who have been part of the food industry for at least a decade share some of the responsibility for upsizing user-friendly packages that have contributed to the increases of pounds, waist-measurements, and fat links to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer as well as to increases in sales and profits. Many of us are complicit in making large quantities of everything easier to buy, carry, and eat. The advertisers who make sugar and fat seem like must-have-fun to two- and four-year-olds probably deserve more of the blame than the rest of us. Shoppers know that they too share the responsibility for how they and their kids eat but increasingly feel that food marketers have made them victims by making the most fattening and most profitable foods available everywhere 24/7.

Shoppers are becoming aware of the upsizing game, and they are beginning to get angry with companies that are pushing them and their children to eat more. One of our shoppers is furious at a movie theatre that offered free packages of M&M's to kids and adults who bought the biggest sizes of popcorn and/or Coke. "With all the talk of obesity, promotions like that are unconscionable! I actually thought about walking out and demanding my ticket money back. How dare they try to get my kids to eat candy with their popcorn!" Another shopper writes: "If supermarkets don't stop putting TV candy at checkout, I'm going to stop using them unless I'm alone."

Obesity has morphed from an appearance problem into a coffin nail. Do you remember what happened when millions of Americans started believing that cigarettes were actually coffin nails? They stopped smoking!

Consumers can't stop eating the way they stopped smoking, but they can get more serious about cutting back on carbohydrates, calories, fat, and portion sizes. And that is just what they are hoping to do. Losing weight that has been piling on for months or years is anything but easy, and consumers are looking for help from new sources. Portion control packages have been available for many years, but with the exception of Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers, they haven't been positioned or marketed as such and we haven't gotten together as an industry to look at packaging from a weight-sensitive point of view.

In the broad-obesity scenario, there will be new ways of looking at portion control packaging and new markets for "fun" packaging of healthy alternatives. Single serve sizes, mini-packs, and individually wrapped slices of cheese will have more value. Multi-packs of 4-ounce yogurts look like gold standard packaging in this market. For larger packages, there may be a market for measuring devices or tiny scales inside of packages--the way that Chock Full o'-Nuts used to include a plastic coffee spoon in every can (I miss them still). Imagine an electronic bell that would ring each time one ounce was dispensed from 16-ounce packages. Imagine see-through thermometers or measuring rules that indicate the weight, carbs, fat grams, or calories of the product dispensed so far.

The opportunity is here. We have found 1000 ways to win while upsizing products and consumers. The challenge now is to win with downsizing. If the economy is going up, it may be easier to help consumers to scale down. But it is and will be an enormous challenge. Consumers like BIG. It's easier to make money on big. It's hard to communicate value when you are delivering less. Readers who remember Campbell's valiant efforts to reposition its 90-calorie soups as The Light Ones may also remember that the effort was a failure. Helping consumers downsize isn't going to be easy but in the new-obesity marketplace, it is much more likely to be rewarding.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Happy New Year! Mona Doyle

The Shopper Report[R] Copyright 2004, edited by Mona Doyle, is published 11 times a year by The Consumer Network, Inc., P.O. Box 42753, Philadelphia PA 19101. Phone (215) 235-2400 FAX: (215) 235-6967. The Consumer Network provides consulting and research services including focus groups, shopping partnerships, home visits, and mail and e-mail surveys.