Search results: food strategy

I’m just back from judging Google’s first Science Fair for kids 13 to 18 at its corporate headquarters in California (yes, those are tomatoes growing in the foreground).

Google’s famous food program: Why famous?  It is:

• Available 24/7
• Totally free
• Varied and delicious
• Designed to promote health as well as environmental values (local, organic, sustainable)

On this last point, the recycling program is comprehensive and the campus is planted with organic vegetables, free for the picking:

But what about the “freshman 15”?

If free food is available 24/7, isn’t Google creating a classic “obesogenic” environment?  Do new Google employees gain weight?

Indeed, they do, and this creates a dilemma for the food team.  I met with Joe Marcus, Google’s food program manager, and executive chef Scott Giambastiani.  Free and very good food, they explain, is an important recruiting perk for Google.   Employees learn to manage it.  And those who are eating healthy food for the first time in their lives find that they actually lose weight.

Google’s food labeling program

Google labels its snacks, drinks, and the foods prepared in its 25 or so cafeterias with traffic lights: green (eat anytime), yellow (once in a while), or red (not often, please).  It bases the decisions about which food goes where on the Harvard School of Public Health’s healthy eating pyramid.   It labels foods at the top of the Harvard pyramid red, the ones in the middle yellow, and those at the bottom green.

In theory this makes sense as a starting point.  In practice, it tends to seem a bit like nutritionism—reducing the value of the foods to a few key nutrients.

The difficulties are most evident in the snack foods, freely available from kiosks all over the campus.   Products are displayed on shelves labeled red, yellow, or green.  For example:

GREEN: Sun chips, 1.5 oz, 210 kcal, 10 g fat, 180 mg sodium, 3 g sugar, 4 g fiber

YELLOW: Lentil chips, 1 oz, 110 kcal, 3 g fat, 170 mg sodium, 1 g sugar, 3 g fiber

YELLOW: Walnuts, 0.8 oz, 150 kcal, 15 g fat, 0 g sodium, 1 g sugar, 2 g fiber

RED:  Luau BBQ chips, 1.5 oz, 210 kcal,  14 g fat, 158 mg sodium, 2 g sugar, 1 g fiber

Note: the weights of the packages are not the same, so the amounts are not really comparable, but the ranking scheme seems to give most credit for fiber.

As for these and the foods cooked in cafeterias, Google uses other strategies to promote healthier choices.  It:

• Puts the healthiest products at eye level
• Uses small plates
• Tries to include vegetables in everything
• Makes healthier options available at all times
• Uses the smallest sizes of snack foods (packages of 2 Oreos, rather than 6)
• Makes it easy to be physically active (Google bicycles!)

The only place on the campus where employees pay for food is from a vending machine.  The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the Harvard pyramid plan.  For the vended products, you pay:

• one cent per gram of sugar
• two cents per gram of fat
• four cents per gram of saturated fat
• one dollar per gram of trans fat

On this basis, Quaker Chewy Bars are 15 cents each, Famous Amos cookies re 55 cents, and an enormous Ghirardelli chocolate bar is $4.25.  Weights don’t count and neither do calories.  The machine is not run by Google.  Whoever does it has a sense of humor.

Impressive, all this.  Not every company can feed its nearly 30,000 employees like this but every company can adopt some of these strategies.  It might save them some health care costs, if nothing else.

I was pleased to see the article in last Sunday’s New York Times about New York City’s efforts to improve school food.   The story focused on PS 56, a school that serves low-income kids in Brooklyn.

The article  describes the food revolution that is taking place in New York City schools, one described in an excellent report by Hunter College faculty.

In singling out PS 56, the writer chose a good example.

I visited there a year or so ago, and wrote about it at the time under the title “School food: it can be done!”  Its cafeteria is an astonishing place.  The food smelled good.  It tasted good.  The staff cared whether the kids ate what they cooked.

When I asked whether this school was typical, the answer was “not exactly.”  How come it worked?  Everyone pointed to the principal, Deborah Clark-Johnson, who believes it’s important to feed kids well and who totally supported the cafeteria staff.

So one way to improve school food is to recruit caring staff.

Another, for older kids, is to encourage them to make better choices.  An article in the Boston Globe discusses Cornell professor Brian Wansink’s work in this area:

But it turns out that students are susceptible to the same marketing strategies that grocery stores have been using for years. Several experiments have shown that children will be more likely to eat items if they see them early in the lunch line and find them attractive and convenient to pick up. Putting fruit in a good-looking bowl works. So does putting a salad bar in a prominent place. Calling your carrots “X-ray vision carrots” can double sales.

I’ve discussed Professor Wansink’s work on lunch line redesign in an earlier post.  It raises an interesting question: is this the right strategy, or should schools just serve healthy food in the first place?

This is worth discussion.  Want to weigh in?

Does corporate social responsibility pay off for corporations?  Indeed it does.  Corporate money buys silence, if nothing else.

William Neuman of the New York Times provides a perfect example of how corporate sponsorship gets precisely what it is intended to do.

In this particular case:

• The corporations are soda companies, Coke and Pepsi.
• The social responsibility is donations of millions of dollars to a good cause.
• The cause is Save the Children, a group devoted to child health and development projects internationally and domestically.
• The intention?   Get Save the Children to stop advocating in favor of soda taxes.

Not long ago, Save the Children was a strong advocate for soda taxes.  Now it is not.  How come?  The group’s website explains:

about a minute ago we said, Corporate donors support us but do not pressure us. Our focus is children not soda tax policy. Back to saving more children now.

The Times, however, suggests a different explanation:

executives at Save the Children were seeking a major grant from Coca-Cola to help finance the health and education programs that the charity conducts here and abroad, including its work on childhood obesity.The talks with Coke are still going on. But the soda tax work has been stopped….In interviews this month, Carolyn Miles, chief operating officer of Save the Children, said there was no connection between the group’s about-face on soda taxes and the discussions with Coke. A $5 million grant from PepsiCo also had no influence on the decision, she said. Both companies fiercely oppose soda taxes.

A mere coincidence?  I don’t think so.  This is a clear win for soda companies, just as was Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the educational activities of the American Academy of Family Physicians. You can bet those activities do not involve telling parents not to give sodas to their kids.

Is this a win for Save the Children?  The Times reports that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funds some of the group’s anti-obesity initiatives, is disappointed.  Evidently, its $3.5 million donation wasn’t enough to convince the group to continue its anti-soda activities.

In the meantime, soda taxes continue to stay on the radar as a weight control strategy.  A new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that soda taxes could lead to a small but potentially significant weight loss.

According to FoodNavigator’s report about the study,the authors say that applying such taxes throughout the United States could generate a billion dollars or more.  It quotes lead researcher Eric Finkelstein: “Although small, given the rising trend in obesity rates, especially among youth, any strategy that shows even modest weight loss should be considered.”

This kind of study is a challenge to soda companies.  Watch Coke and Pepsi continue donations to charitable and health groups and watch those groups say not one word about the contribution of sodas to obesity.  Cigarettes, anyone?

It is always interesting to watch the food industry deal with criticism.  One common strategy is to discredit critics through personal attacks. Most companies are too embarrassed to do this publicly.  Instead, they pay public relations firms—in this case, the Center for Consumer Freedom—to do this for them.

What is this group?  See Center for Consumer Freedom Exposed and follow the links to see lists of the food industry donors it keeps secret.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am an occasional target of this group, as can be seen from  the piece it posted yesterday:

Marion Nestle, Food Fascist

Sound harsh? After our latest check-in with everyone’s favorite anti-pleasure nutritionist, we think it’s completely appropriate. Marion Nestle published an article on her blog today quoting a law professor named Timothy Lytton, who insists that trampling on anyone’s First Amendment rights is a no-no. That prompted Nestle and fellow obesity warrior Dr. David Ludwig to fire off an astonishing letter.

The post goes on to quote extensively from my comments earlier this week.  It also points out:

At the end of the day, there’s no high-minded Constitutional principle in play here. This is about Marion Nestle attacking businesses she doesn’t like. This is the same professor who delivered a speech at an event sponsored by the “Socialist Conference” of the American Public Health Association. Nestle also addressed the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in 2003.

These kinds of strategies speak for themselves.

The corporations that hire the Center to do things like this should be ashamed of themselves.

I had a good laugh when Dick Jackson, who chairs the Environmental Health Sciences department at UCLA’s School of Public Health, forwarded this article: “McDonald’s and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy.”

I assumed this was another priceless piece from The Onion, whose recent article on the effects of the U.S. Farm Bill on soybean production is equally hilarious.

But no such luck.  The British food writer, Felicity Lawrence, has three investigative reports in the November 12 issue of The Guardian (U.K.).  You want to see food politics in action?  Watch what is happening in Britain since the conservative government of David Cameron took over (I have commented on this previously).

Lawrence writes that the U.K. Department of Health has invited companies such as McDonald’s, KFC, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars, and Diageo to form “food networks” to write policies to address public health problems such as obesity, alcohol, and diet-related disease.  I have highlighted some of the critical issues in red.

The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal’s sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps.

The leading supermarkets are an equally strong presence, while the responsibility [for the] deal’s physical activity group is chaired by the Fitness Industry Association, which is the lobby group for private gyms and personal trainers.

In early meetings, these commercial partners have been invited to draft priorities and identify barriers, such as EU legislation, that they would like removed. They have been assured by Lansley [the health secretary] that he wants to explore voluntary not regulatory approaches…Using the pricing of food or alcohol to change consumption has been ruled out. One group was told that the health department did not want to lead, but rather hear from its members what should be done.

As for what this means:

Jeanette Longfield, head of the food campaign group Sustain, said: “This is the equivalent of putting the tobacco industry in charge of smoke-free spaces. We know this ‘let’s all get round the table approach’ doesn’t work, because we’ve all tried it before, including the last Conservative government. This isn’t ‘big society’, it’s big business.”

Lawrence has two additional articles on the background of this move.  “First goal of David Cameron’s ‘nudge unit’ is to encourage healthy living” explains that the focus of these efforts will be on food and alcohol choices:

The idea is that individuals can be persuaded – “nudged” – into making better choices for themselves without force or regulation. The coalition agreement talks about “finding intelligent ways to encourage people to make better choices for themselves.”

Her second background piece, “Who is the government’s health deal with big business really good for?”, explains how this happened.

It must have felt like a new dawn for the food and drinks industries. After more than four years of determined and co-ordinated lobbying, they were about to achieve the corporate PR agency dream: being invited to write the policy themselves. And, if the Conservatives won the election, in Lansley they would have a health secretary who understood them.

He not only subscribed to the libertarian view that public health should be more a matter of personal responsibility than government action; he bought in to the whole pro-business PR view of the world….Lansley had already adopted several of the industry’s favoured approaches to the food, drink and health crises, promising that “government and FSA promotion of traffic light labelling will stop”; that there would be no mandatory extension of advertising restrictions; and that alcohol strategy would focus on the responsible drinking messages and improved labelling the industry preferred to regulation.

Lansley also committed to avoiding a narrow focus on “fear of junk foods” that might demonise individual manufacturers’ products, and to talking instead in terms of diets as a whole, of the balance of energy in and energy out, and of portion size. He had said the government and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) would “highlight the continuing contribution made by business to improving diet by reformulating its products“.

Yeah, right.  Even The Onion could not make this up.

Could this happen here?  Grass-roots democracy, anyone?

New York City is serious about trying to reduce rates of obesity and the expensive and debilitating conditions for which obesity raises risks.  Its latest move?  It is asking the USDA for a Food Stamp waiver for two years during which recipients would not be allowed to use their benefit cards to buy sodas.

I hardly know where to begin on this one.  I learned about this from the front page of this morning’s New York Times and from reading the accompanying op-ed by city Health Commissioner Tom Farley and New York State Health Commissioner Richard Daines.

This is an old, old idea that has been consistently rejected by USDA and by public health advocates for the poor.  It is based on the commonly held notion—never conclusively demonstrated by independent data—that recipients of Food Stamps (now called SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program)–make worse food choices than everyone else.

New York City, according to the Times account, has 1.7 million people who receive SNAP benefits.  The rationale for banning soda purchases?

City statistics released last month showed that nearly 40 percent of public-school children in kindergarten through eighth grade were overweight or obese, and that obesity rates were substantially higher in poor neighborhoods. City studies show that consumption of sugared beverages is consistently higher in those neighborhoods….Anticipating such criticism, Dr. Farley and Dr. Daines said that the food-stamp program already prohibited the use of benefits to buy cigarettes, beer, wine, liquor or prepared foods.

The op-ed points out:

Every year, tens of millions of federal dollars are spent on sweetened beverages in New York City through the food stamp program — far more than is spent on obesity prevention. This amounts to an enormous subsidy to the sweetened beverage industry.

I asked for data on soda purchases by New York City SNAP recipients, and was sent the city’s waiver request to USDA:

An estimated $75 to $135 million dollars of SNAP funds were spent on sweetened beverages in New York City (NYC) alone in 2009 [Based on Nielsen beverage market data for 2009, the prevalence of SNAP participants in NYC, and prior studies of SNAP purchasing behavior].   This use of federal funds to purchase a group of products that are leading contributors to the diabetes and obesity epidemics (and whose extensive consumption contradicts the USDA’s own recommended dietary guidelines) far outstrips current federal funding for prevention of these health problems.

I am, as readers of this blog well know, no fan of sodas.   If people want to do something about controlling body weight, the best place to begin is by cutting out sodas.  Soft drinks contain sugars and, therefore, calories, but nothing else.  As the Center for Science in the Public Interest has long maintained, sodas are liquid candy.   And I am on record as favoring soda taxes (see previous posts) as a strategy to discourage use, especially among young people.

But if I were in charge of Food Stamps, I would much prefer incentives: make the benefit worth twice as much when spent for fresh (or single-ingredient frozen) fruits and vegetables.

How far will the city get with this request?  I can’t wait to find out.  If you want to watch lobbying in action, keep an eye on this one, as I certainly will.

As for this proposal?

In a classic example of government sending the fox off to guard the chickens, Andrew Lansley, Britain’s new health minister has just handed the country’s food industry a gift it cannot refuse.  If the industry agrees to pay for the British government’s principal anti-obesity campaign, the government promises that it will impose no new regulations on the industry.

According to The Guardian (UK):

[Lansley] told a conference of public health experts that he wanted a new partnership with food and drink firms. In exchange for a “non-regulatory approach”, the private sector would put up cash to fund the Change4Life campaign to improve diets and boost levels of physical activity among young people…He said business people ‘understand the social responsibility of people having a better lifestyle and they don’t regard that as remotely inconsistent with their long-term commercial interest.”

I posted about the Change4Life program on January 24, 2009.  Even then, it was clear that the program was deeply influenced by food industry interests:

British government launched an anti-obesity campaign: The UK government’s Change4Life campaign is designed to promote healthier lifestyles.  This is causing much discussion, not least because of its food-industry sponsorship (uh oh).  Food companies are said to view the campaign as good for business (uh oh, indeed). The government wants everyone to help with the campaign by putting up posters and such, and its website is cheery.  Buried in all of this is some good advice, but most of it is phrased as eat better, not eat less or avoid.  That, of course, is why the food industry is willing to fund a campaign which, if successful, could hardly be in the food industry’s best interest.

I asked Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London, what this was all about (he wrote an editorial for the British Medical Journal, which I will post when it appears).

The speech by Andrew Lansley was pretty depressing. Not only did it forecast handing over funding of the sole national social marketing effort on obesity to companies, but it also heralds a return to the bad old days when the UK Government buried its head in the sand about food and public health issues. It’s taken 30 years to get first the Thatcher-Major Conservative Government (in the 1980s & 90s) and then the Blair-Brown Labour Government (in the 2000s) to see that government does have a role.

Indeed, without government setting the framework, there can be a race to the bottom: an avalanche of competing messages all appealing to individual behaviour change, when no individual can control the determinants of their health. That’s why so many people are troubled by Mr Lansley’s speech. It winds back that learning process over the last two decades, reducing health to individual choices and to market relationships.

Ironically, that might be its Achilles heel. As a strategy, corporate responsibility puts awesome responsibility on the companies to sort out public health, which they neither want to do (they sell products, not health!) nor are able to do, even if they wanted to. Not even the mightiest food companies control all the variables for health.

In that sense, Mr Lansley’s speech was dangerously policy illiterate. Advances in health come when the ground rules are changed; thereafter, let markets operate, fine. But to reduce public health to market dynamics flies in the face of history. But let’s see. Maybe this was sabre rattling. But maybe not.

Michele Simon, who alerted me to this story in the first place, asks: “What is the trade exactly?”  This is a complete “win-win for industry.  They get to run the campaign and not be regulated.”

Moral: Expect no public health messages about eating less, or further restrictions on health claims from this campaign.

Ordinarily, I don’t pay much attention to consumer surveys because the results are so dependent on the way the questions are asked and who gets polled.  But this one, conducted by StrategicOne and sent to me by Edelman Public Relations, is relatively uncomplicated.

It asks three questions (top responses, order of priority):

Which ONE of the following best describes the way in which you primarily think about food in your life? Health 23%, connection 18%, fuel 15%, love 12%,  pride 11%.

How important is it to you that each of the following food sources have specific initiatives focused on health, wellness and nutrition for people consuming their products? Supermarkets 91%, food producers 90%, packaged food companies 83%, casual dining restaurants 81%, fast food 68%.

How important is it to you that a food company have each of the following types of initiatives? Healthy foods that taste great 94%, health foods 92%, nutrition information 92%, community social responsibility 89%, front-of-package nutrition information 88%, fewer ingredients 75%.

People may not agree about they way they think about food, but it sounds like the respondents to this survey want the foods offered in supermarkets and restaurants to just take care of the health issues for them.  Good idea.