Unexpected Consequences
Campbell Soup tried improving the nutrition profile of select soups
by reducing salt content and adding fresh herbs and spices. Salt is cheap.
Adding more herbs and spices is not. When costs rose, product com-
petitiveness fell, and market share suffered, Wall Street downgraded
the company. A new CEO was brought in, whose turnaround plan in-
cluded adding salt back into soup.
For several years, major cereal manufacturers like General Mills, Post,
and Kellogg offered breakfast cereals with reduced levels of sugar; some
sugary brands were even discontinued. But having watched cereal sales
decline by percent in five years, in 0 8 they brought back the sugar
and reintroduced old brands. Those with sugar are outselling some of
the healthier versions. As one executive put it, “Taste is king.”
Companies also plot to guide consumers on nutrition and health.
When PepsiCo rolled out its new food categories, comprising half
of the company’s sixty-six billion dollars in sales, the CEO said, “We
have never seen food consumers as confused as they are today.” With
that introduction she announced three categories—“good for you,” “bet-
ter for you,” and “fun for you.” Quaker oats were in the “good for you”
category. Fritos corn chips were assigned to the “fun for you” category.
Of course, a “bad for you” category was never announced. The strat-
egy was less about resolving consumer confusion and more about pro-
moting sales.
When food is manufactured according to the perfect formula, mes-
saging matters. Advertisements and food labels are integral to driving
up sales. Yet more than a century after food manufacturers were legally
compelled to be transparent about what was in their products, what can
be said or withheld is as contested as ever.
In the 980 s, as awareness grew about food’s role in chronic disease,
a more health-conscious public called for additional transparency, par-
ticularly for processed foods. A renewed interest in labels emerged.
Claims that foods were “low fat,” for example, had no standardized
baseline for comparison.
In a marketing ploy to sell more All Bran cereal, Kellogg’s had featured
on their boxes the National Cancer Institute’s recommendation to “eat
high-fiber foods”—not-so-subtly implying that All Bran cereal helped