In a world increasingly focused on health and wellness, the food industry finds itself at a crossroads. Giants like General Mills, Kellogg, and PepsiCo are navigating shifting consumer preferences and a growing awareness of the impact of processed foods on health. This article delves into General Mills' controversial "anti-diet" initiative, examining its motivations, implications, and the broader context of the food industry's response to evolving consumer demands.
The Push for Processed Foods in American Dinners
At the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference, major food companies articulated a vision of their processed products as integral components of American meals, rather than mere snacks. Despite a substantial body of research highlighting the potential negative health consequences associated with these foods, executives are keen to maintain and expand their presence in consumers' kitchens. This ambition raises questions about the industry's role in promoting healthy eating habits and addressing public health concerns.
Kellanova's Pricing and the Question of Goodwill
The CEO of Kellanova suggested that cereal could serve as a cost-effective dinner option in response to inflation. However, Kellanova's product pricing has outpaced inflation in recent years, sparking debate about the company's priorities and its impact on consumers. This situation raises questions about the potential for consumer boycotts and the long-term effects of such comments on brand reputation and consumer loyalty. Southpaw Insights suggests that well-designed research plans and mixed-methodology expertise are needed to measure the true strength of brand equity and consumer attitudes.
The Anti-Food-Shaming Campaign
The initiative described in a recent Washington Post article is not an anti-diet campaign but rather a campaign against food-shaming. Shrugging one's shoulders (or rolling one's eyes) and saying that the two are basically the same thing is missing a subtle but important distinction. In fact, the WaPo article, and the reaction that it has triggered, vividly demonstrates just how justified this campaign against food-shaming is.
Ultra-Processed Foods: A Nuanced Perspective
The statement that General Mills' products are "high glycemic ultra-processed foods that drive insulin resistance, inflammation, and weight gain" is an overly broad characterization and unsupported by the facts. It is true that associations have been found between so-called UPFs and a variety of risk factors and health concerns. However, research has also demonstrated this category-as currently defined-to be a poor proxy for nutritional quality.
Read also: Is the GM Diet Right for You?
Ready-to-eat cereals are the specific category of UPFs in the cross-hairs of the WaPo's attempted takedown. These run the gamut from low to moderate to high glycemic load. Even so, to my knowledge, no association has ever been detected between the consumption of RTE cereals and insulin resistance, inflammatory markers, or weight gain. In fact, data indicate that frequent consumers of RTE cereals (the whole category, not just the "virtuous" ones) have a lower risk of overweight and insulin resistance, higher overall diet quality, and do not consume any more sugar than those who rarely consume them.
Self-Serving or Valid?
This campaign is clearly self-serving for General Mills. But that does not necessarily make it invalid. It's not surprising that General Mills is investing money into the anti-diet movement. It's a logical business strategy to defend its products - high-glycemic ultra-processed foods that drive insulin resistance, inflammation, and weight gain.
The Anti-Diet Movement: A Closer Look
The anti-diet movement encompasses several key principles:
Rejecting Diet Culture
Rejecting diet culture is a great idea. I'm not a fan of dieting - it's rarely a sustainable strategy for anyone long-term. But dieting is not the same as establishing an improved dietary baseline - which is a foundational part of optimizing health and weight.
Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is great for a small segment of our population, namely people who already have a healthy dietary baseline, a solid foundation of nutrition, and who aren't already battling a disease related to energy intake and energy storage.
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Combatting Weight Stigma
Combatting weight stigma is also a great idea. Why? Having obesity is not healthy - no more than having a sunburn is ever healthy. Having a small amount of excess subcutaneous fat isn't typically bad for us. Human beings are meant to have the capacity to store some excess fat for a rainy day but it's not much. Once those cells reach capacity, they release all sorts of inflammatory cytokines and hormones into the bloodstream. Even in the absence of obvious metabolic disease (diabetes, ASCVD), those inflammatory cytokines wreak havoc on the body in multiple ways. And storing fat in our abdominal cavity (visceral fat) or in our liver (hepatic fat) is not healthy - no matter how much weight we have stored in our subcutaneous tissues.
With 93% of American adults having at least one marker of metabolic disease, rather than trying to get us to adopt a mindset of "healthy at any size" we need to replace our current narrative with "unhealthy at any size". We also need to work harder at separating beauty and self-worth from weight. Although "healthy at any size" doesn't work medically, this doesn't mean we can't be "beautiful at any size" or "happy at any size." People can have obesity and still be beautiful just as people can have obesity and still be happy.
General Mills at 150: A Legacy and a Challenge
General Mills, a company with deep roots in Minneapolis, is celebrating its 150th anniversary. However, the company faces challenges as consumer preferences shift and sales decline. Despite cost-cutting measures and investments in IT, General Mills is grappling with the changing landscape of the food industry.
The Perimeter Shopping Trend
Consumers are increasingly turning away from packaged foods and becoming so-called “perimeter shoppers,” who buy most of their food from the meat, seafood, dairy and produce sections that line the outer aisles of the grocery store. According to a recent Food Marketing Institute survey of shopping trends, about one-quarter of consumers say they want short, simple ingredient lists. A similar number looks for locally grown or produced foods, and a slightly bigger segment, about 28 percent, say they prefer minimally processed foods. The study also found that what consumers most want in their foods are whole grains. The list of things they want least includes salt, sugar and artificial ingredients.
The Cereal Conundrum
The sagging popularity of its largest overall product line, Big G ready-to-eat cereals, is a major factor in the company’s performance. Last year, despite increasing its share of the domestic cereal market, General Mills’ cereal revenue decreased 3 percent to $2.3 billion-an incremental stumble, but the wrong direction in a category that had grown for decades.
Read also: General Hospital's Maxie Jones: A New Chapter
Adapting to Changing Tastes
General Mills has re-invented itself many times over the years. Four years ago, General Mills started thinking about how to remake Trix by removing the artificial dyes and replacing them with natural coloring agents. Over the next several decades, General Mills opened technical and manufacturing divisions that produced everything from military weapons to high-altitude balloons. In the 1960s, the company went on an acquisitions spree, buying its way into industries that included fashion, outfitting, toys, games and restaurants.
The company has adapted to changing consumer tastes over most of the past 20 years, and now realizes it needs to move more quickly than before. The company’s R&D budget last year was $230 million. Renovating a big company is a big undertaking, and at General Mills the renovation is operating on multiple fronts. Cost-cutting is part of it. So are acquisitions and investments in food startups.
The Gluten-Free Experiment
Last year, General Mills tinkered with Cheerios by making them gluten-free, in response to one of the hottest dietary trends to come along. After gluten-free Cheerios hit retail shelves last summer, baseline sales climbed 3 percent by the end of November.
The Taste Test
Yet if one principle stands above all others at General Mills, it’s that whatever is in the box has to taste good. This has been difficult to do when removing artificial colors, because natural colors are more likely to bring with them additional flavors. For many reformulations, that’s not a problem because the change is actually a response to consumer feedback. But every reformulation involves continuous consumer testing of new recipes as it goes along, and the minute somebody says it doesn’t taste good, alarms go off. Another strategy is to keep reformulations low-key so that consumers don’t notice. Erickson calls it “stealth health.”
Successes and Struggles
Sales of Chex cereals, which had been declining for five years, grew 10 percent a year between 2010 and 2014 after Big G removed the gluten. But the company has also struggled with some efforts. General Mills also has done well with its new-era acquisitions thus far. Another standout is one of the company’s newest acquisitions-Annie’s, the Berkeley, Calif.-based organic and natural foods company acquired for $820 million in 2014. In January, General Mills bought Epic Provisions, a 2-year-old Austin, Texas-based maker of sustainably sourced trail mixes and meat-and-fruit snacks marketed to fitness-oriented consumers.
The Rise of Organic and the Distrust of Big Food
Barriers to entry into the food business have fallen, there’s a tsunami of capital to fund new ventures, and social media is revolutionizing marketing, Erickson says. And one of the messages out there is that you should not trust Big Food. One of its first efforts was an e-commerce product called Nibblr, a subscription snack service that didn’t work. Since October, 301 has acted more like a venture capital operation. The idea now is to capitalize small food companies that are exclusively about innovation. One of the companies 301 has invested in is Rhythm Superfoods, a 6-year-old Austin, Texas-based maker of kale chips.
The Weight Paradox
One confounding aspect of the perimeter-shopping trend is that it does not appear to be driven by worries about body weight. Yet marketing food to an overweight population is difficult.
The Carbohydrate Revolution
Science journalist Gary Taubes has been an architect of the changing food scene. In 2002, Taubes published a story in the New York Times Magazine arguing that the cause of the epidemic of obesity was not fat in the diet, as had been the common wisdom, but rather overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially highly refined carbs and sugars. The article, which overturned decades of orthodoxy about what a healthy diet should consist of, caused a sensation. The high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, a 30-year-old memory, got a second life.
“These companies didn’t know they were selling unhealthy products,” says Taubes. “It was just the opposite. They were being told that fat was bad and that carbohydrates were good. So cereal makers had reason to believe their products were healthy. Nobody thought refined grains were a problem, and sugar was getting a pass. For a long time, nutrition scientists were on their side. In fact, until recently the government’s dietary guidelines did line up nicely for Big G and other legacy cereal brands. But the guidelines, which are issued every five years, have evolved rapidly. The pyramid has been replaced by a dinner plate divided, pie-like, into quadrants. Fruits, vegetables and proteins-the store perimeter categories-occupy three of the four quadrants.
The Consumer is Always Right?
Peter Erickson, General Mills’ executive vice president for innovation, technology and quality, says Big G didn’t take gluten out of Cheerios because of the small number of people who can’t eat gluten. They took it out because of the large number of people who would prefer not to eat gluten. “There was a day when we would have argued the point-argued the science,” he says.
Co-opting the Anti-Diet Movement
The anti-diet movement is a welcome and long-overdue effort to combat fat-shaming and promote body positivity. However, it’s also an initiative that’s being exploited by Big Food to peddle high-calorie, low-nutrition products to increase profits. The anti-diet movement - again, a legitimate movement aimed at fighting the dangerous junk science behind dieting - has been co-opted by the food industry, who are paying dietitian influencers to say things like ‘all foods have value’ while brandishing packages of Twix and Reese’s.
Ozempic and the Future of Fat
Drugs like Ozempic “can be understood as a form of ‘pre-emptive obesity biopolitics,’” a term used to describe policy interventions that seek in the present to prevent “fat futures.” By creating new markets of consumers obsessed with their weight, “everyone can hop on the bandwagon that tramples over fat people in the pursuit of wealth and market share, even if it means pushing unrealistic and unattainable beauty and size ideals.”
The Ozempic Experience
Taking the medication, she argues, is much more complicated than many accounts would have you believe. In her case, she suffered from severe nausea and fatigue so intense that “walking felt like I was dragging a palette of concrete cinder blocks behind me.” Her intent isn’t to demonize the drug; the decision to take it, she stresses, is between people and their doctors. What she’s hoping to do is add nuance to people’s understanding of the experience. “Just remember how complicated taking this medication is and how hard it can be for a person to take it and include it in their life,” she writes. “Less judgment about weight loss would help, too.”
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