Is the future of fast food… healthy?
Reported September 30, 2011
Fruit disguised as fries, carrots masquerading as crisps, sodium-free salt. Fast food is changing. But will the public swallow it?
At the beginning of September last year, pupils at Mason High School in Cincinnati found something unusual in their canteen. Alongside the traditional vending machines that had been supplying them with chocolates, crisps and fizzy drinks for most of their formative years, was another machine – painted bright orange – selling nothing but carrots. Exactly the same size and shape as a conventional snack machine, the fresh produce on its shelves was packaged in small, opaque, crinkly bags similar to the sort of bags crisps come in. There were a number of different designs – one featured a weird orange alien creature on a green background, another had a black carrot-shaped object travelling through space – but inside all of the bags was the same thing: about three ounces of washed and peeled baby carrots, selling for 50 cents a bag.
Just in case the broad brush strokes on the packaging hadn’t got the message across, a strapline, in bold white lettering on the side of the machine, hammered the point home: “Baby carrots. Eat ‘em like junk food”.
The response was startling. Within an hour, pupils all over the school were walking around, munching on their new orangey treats. In the weeks that followed, the machine was emptied faster than the manufacturers could fill it.
“If they wanted a snack, they bought a bag of carrots,” recalls Tim Keeton, Mason’s assistant principal. “It easily got as much custom as our other vending machines which were selling the normal range of stuff; Sun Chips, Doritos, Cheetos and chocolate chip cookies.” The machine is no longer at the school. It was part of a six-month trial by one of the largest growers of carrots in the United States, Bolthouse Farms. But Bryan Reese, a graduate of the US Army’s West Point academy and the company’s head of marketing, believes the results of the test, which took place in schools and supermarkets in both Cincinnati and Syracuse, New York, herald the beginning of a new era in snack food.
“We looked at the success of mass-marketed categories and decided to take a page out of their marketing book,” says Reese. “We said, ‘We are not a vegetable, we’re a snack. If you want a vegetable, go eat broccoli. If you want a snack, eat baby carrots. They’re perfect for you. They’re crunchy, they’re bright orange; they’re sweet and they’re fun.’ We advertised for a couple of months and the category grew in double digits.” The brand is now off the market as Bolthouse makes plans for another, larger trial. If that trial is successful, then Reese thinks he may finally have discovered something parents and campaigners, both in the US and here in Britain, have been searching for for decades: a way to sell healthy produce to fast-food junkies.
The company has also hired senior figures from the World Health Organisation to drive through the changes, and spent millions of dollars reducing the sugar, fat and salt in products throughout its portfolio. In one of its most successful brands — Walkers — salt levels have been reduced by between 25 and 55 per cent and saturated fats by 70 to 80 per cent, and soon the company’s biochemists hope to introduce a brand-new salt, with drastically reduced sodium levels, yet all the taste.
Coca-Cola too has accepted some responsibility for the current levels of obesity (although, like all junk-food manufacturers, it prefers to single out sedentary lifestyles as the main culprit) and pledged itself to cutting the amount of sugar in its drinks if this can be done without changing the taste. Coke Zero, launched five years ago to appeal to health-conscious men who didn’t like Diet Coke (drunk predominantly by women), is the main feather in its cap. It boasts a taste that’s virtually indistinguishable from that of regular Coke. But Coca-Cola has also reduced the amount of sugar in regular Fanta by 30 per cent and Lilt by 60 per cent, without anyone really noticing. You simply cannot buy full-sugar Fanta or Lilt anymore.
“We don’t always flag it with a sign on the front saying this is no longer full-sugar because, for some people, taste is the most important thing, and you don’t always want to tell people in big letters what you’ve done,” says Helen Munday, Coca-Cola’s director of science. “[But], like many responsible manufacturers, we want to play our part in making sure that people have foods that can fit into their healthy lifestyles.” The world’s largest fizzy drink manufacturer spending millions on reducing the calorie content of two of its biggest brands and not even telling any of its customers what it’s done? It sounds a little strange. But, multinationals like Coca-Cola have not got to where they are today without learning how to predict trends and stave off potential crises. Realising how much pressure politicians are under to look tough on junk food, they have reasoned it’s better to move fast and prove themselves responsible, than to stay still and ultimately provoke new legislation which could impose expensive burdens on them to reformulate their products faster than they can or would like to.
Following the same logic, United Biscuits has reduced the saturated fat of McVitie’s Digestives by 80 per cent and Hobnobs by 75 per cent, Nestlé has reduced sodium levels in Shreddies by 43 per cent and Kraft Foods has globally reformulated or launched more than 5,000 products.
There have also been significant changes at McDonald’s, which now includes the calorie content of its products on its menus and has reduced the saturated fat and calories in its burgers. It also cooks its chips in a healthier canola-blend oil and includes slices of apples in the Happy Meals sold to children in the US. In a similar vein, Burger King offers young customers fresh, peeled apple, in the shape of chips, under the brand name Apple Fries.
Manufacturers are also keeping a keen eye on the latest trend for so-called “nutricosmetics”; foods that improve the structure of the skin.
Mars tested the proposition in 2008 with Dove Beautiful and Dove Vitalize, chocolate with added flavonols and minerals, but none of the major producers has so far developed a range for the mainstream market. There is also a line of prototype sweets, currently being trialled by the German-based company Beneo, that strengthen bones and improve digestion.
Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away. Junk-food manufacturers are still motivated primarily by profit and will do whatever they can to maximise the bottom line without damaging their image. Many low-fat products have simply replaced fat with sugar and are still far from healthy.
What’s more, if the public protests against the taste of a reformulated product – as happened earlier this month with Heinz’s HP Sauce, which, it was revealed, had had its salt levels reduced surreptitiously – the producer can normally be expected to change it back.
All of which means there is still a gap in the market for a smaller company to become some sort of consumer champion. Bear, a healthy snack-food producer which was set up two years ago by personal trainer Hayley Gait-Golding and her husband Andrew, could be that company. Its Yo Yos fruit rolls, aimed at children, and its Fruit and Granola Nibbles for adults, have been flying off the shelves in Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury’s and seem to have the appeal of a “treat” without any of the corresponding ill effects of chocolate or crisps. The company’s turnover for this year is already £3million and, as it continues to grow and win fans with its refusal to use chemicals and preservatives, its popularity might force the standards of bigger companies upwards.
In the meantime, Dr Mike Rayner, director of the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at the University of Oxford, warns there is still a long way to go if we are to reverse the frightening rise in obesity.
“There is some evidence to show that some things are improving in Britain,” he says. “Fruit intakes are increasing, levels of awareness about diet have increased. But it’s not just about producing healthier foods within the snack or confectionary category. We have to get people to eat fewer snacks and less confectionary. And if you’re in the snack-food market like Pepsi are, you don’t want that to happen.”