Currently browsing posts about: Marketing to kids

I’ve been collecting items sent to me this week about government actions at the local, state, and national level.  Here’s the weekend round up.

Santa Clara County, California, Board of Supervisors bans toys in kids meals: On April 27, the San Jose Mercury News announced that this county, clearly at the vanguard of actions to help prevent childhood obesity, passed a groundbreaking law banning toys in kids’ meals that do not meet minimal nutrition standards (the very ones I talked about in a previous post).  Companies can still give out toys in meals, as long as the meals meet those standards.  What an excellent idea.  Let’s hope this idea catches on in other communities.

Here’s the press release, a a fact sheet on childhood obesity, and remarks by the president of the board of supervisors, along with recommendations from the local public health agency.  Thanks to Michele Simon for the documents.

Connecticut state legislature plays computer games: This photo, attributed to the Associated Press, arrived from Michelle Futrell.  I worried that it might be Photoshopped.  Whether it is or not, it is flying around the Internet, in versions that clearly identify each of hard-at-play legislators.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) teaches kids about marketing: The FTC regulates advertising, including food advertising, and it must be getting increasingly concerned about the effects of marketing on kids.  To counter some of these effects, it has created a website, Admongo.gov, an interactive site to teach kids about advertising.  After playing these games, the FTC wants kids to be able to answer these questions:

• Who is responsible for the ad?
• What is the ad actually saying?
• What does the ad want me to do?

The New York Times concludes: “Perhaps the effort comes not a moment too soon. Adweek devotes this week’s issue to “Kids” and “How the industry is striving to conquer this coveted market.” Thanks to Lisa Young for sending the links.

The FDA asks for comments on front-of-package (FOP) labeling: Patricia Kuntze, a consumer affairs advisor at the FDA sends the April 28 press release and the April 29 Federal Register notice announcing the FDA’s call for public comment on this topic.  The agency particularly wants data on:

• The extent to which consumers notice, use, and understand FOP nutrition symbols or shelf tags
• Results of research examining the effectiveness of various FOP approaches
• Graphic design, marketing, and advertising that will help consumers understand nutrition information
• The extent to which FOP labeling influences food manufacturers’ decisions about the contents of their products

The goal, says the FDA, is to make “calorie and nutrition information available to consumers in ways that will help them choose foods for more healthful diets – an effort that has taken on special importance, given the prevalence of obesity and diet-related diseases in the U.S. and of increasingly busy lifestyles that demand quick, nutritious food.”

Here is a speech on the topic by FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D.  For information about how to submit comments, click here. To submit comments, refer to docket FDA-2010-N-0210 and click here. You have until July 28 to do it.

Public comment, of course, includes the food industry and a FoodNavigator call for industry comment cites my recent commentary in JAMA with David Ludwig.  I’m glad food industry people are reading it and I hope the FDA does too.

The White House equivocates on organics: What’s going on with the White House garden?  Is it organic or not?   Michael Pollan forwards this item from the Associated Press:

Assistant White House Chef Sam Kass, an old friend of President Barack Obama’s who oversees the garden, says labeling the crops “organic” isn’t the point, even though the White House only uses natural, not synthetic, fertilizers and pesticides.

“To come out and say (organic) is the one and only way, which is how this would be interpreted, doesn’t make any sense,” Kass said Monday as he walked among the garden’s newly planted broccoli, rhubarb, carrots and spinach. “This is not about getting into all that. This is about kids.”

Uh oh.  Has “Organic” become the new O-word?  Surely, the White House is not secretly pouring herbicides and pesticides over its garden vegetables.  If not, are we hearing a small indication of big agribusiness pushback?

Food politics makes strange bedfellows.

The Associated Press reports that an organization of retired military personnel, Mission Readiness, is upset about obesity.  American youth, it says, are  Too Fat to Fight. Obesity may be a threat to personal health, but this group sees the problem as a threat to national security (see note below).

Here’s the irony.  The exact opposite was true in World War II.  Then, the army had trouble finding recruits who were not undernourished.

How did we go from lean to fat?  TV food commercials, for one thing, says Jane Brody in a review of recent studies.   Kids eat what they see.  The Rudd Center at Yale has even more recent data on the number of commercials watched by young children.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is responsible for regulating advertising.  It has been making noises lately about taking on food marketing to kids.  I’ve heard rumors that the FTC is ready to release a report on the topic but food marketer’ complaints are holding it up.  Many marketers (not just of food) are worried that the FTC might move to restrict Internet marketing.

This might be a good time to ask the FTC what it is doing about food marketing to kids.

Note: Thanks to Bob Bannister for reminding me of George Saunders’ Shouts & Murmurs piece on this topic in the New Yorker.

Addition, April 22: The rumors about food industry pressures on the FTC turn out to be true.  Margo Wootan of CSPI reports on a meeting today with representatives of the FTC:

A number of members of the Food Marketing Workgroup met with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz today and delivered the letter [urging the FTC to publish standards for marketing to children]. It was a good meeting.They said that the standards are not in jeopardy and should be out in the near future. All the industry opposition has caused the agencies to go through a more thorough (i.e., slow) clearance process.

If you can’t block action, you can always delay it as long as possible.

I’m not sure why this would be news to anyone who has taken a toddler to a grocery store, but researchers at the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that very young children recognize food brands, especially McDonald’s.  Didn’t Morgan Spurlock show this in Supersize Me! (also my screen debut)?  Whatever.  It’s good to have the research and the implications are clear: something must be done to put some curbs on food marketing to kids.

That was my take-home lesson from the article in the New York Times about advertising in magazines aimed at children.  Thanks to Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest for pointing out the most telling quotes.

From the editor of Sports Illustrated Kids:

We’ve really built our business around a strategy, when it comes to advertising partners, of allowing them to really make use of our ability to get this youth audience in all the ways that they’re out there, so we get them in school, we get them in print, we get them when they’re out of school and having fun through sports.

From the editor of Boys’ Life:

We believe this is part of the learning process: why shield them from any of the marketing experience that comes with making a purchase decision?

Kids don’t have a chance against those kinds of attitudes, do they?

To anyone following the ins and outs of food industry “self-regulation” of marketing to kids, here is a gift – courtesy of Margo Wootan of Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).  Margo forwards a set of background papers and speeches on the topic.  I’ve posted some of these earlier, but it is good to have them in one place.

1. The study of food marketing by Dale Kunkel for Children Now

2. Elaine Kolish’s December speech in response to the Children Now study.  She is the head of the industry kids’ self-regulation unit at the Better Business Bureau.  Her conclusion: self-regulation is working.

3. The Rudd Center’s cereal marketing study summary

4. CSPI’s studies on food industry self-regulation

Enjoy, but also put to good use!

Thanks to my NYU Medical Center colleague, Dr. Melissa Bender for the alert about the blogosphere fuss over Cascadian Farm Purely O’s cereals.  Apparently, Cascadian Farm, now owned by Big Food General Mills:

quietly changed the recipe for its “Purely O’s” cereal — previously an unsweetened favorite among children/toddlers – to include three times the sugar, as well as new fillers/sweeteners such as corn meal and tapioca syrup. They did this with no announcement on the label, taking advantage of those who trusted the brand for its previous simplicity. Loyal customers, particularly parents who had chosen this product because it was one of the few unsweetened options available, are outraged by this secretive yet major reformulation. Many discovered the change when their children spat out the cereal (myself included).

Her note sent me right to the largest of the three Whole Foods stores within walking distance of my Manhattan apartment.  Purely O’s: 3 grams of sugars, 3 grams of fiber, and 160 mg sodium per serving.

Oops: low-sugar, yes, but only medium-fiber and high in sodium.  Even with 0 grams of sugar, it’s not all that great.  Neither, for that matter, is its non-organic analog Cheerios (1 gram sugar, 3 grams fiber, 190 mg sodium).

At 3 grams of sugar per serving, Purely O’s is still lower in sugar than practically every other cereal in Whole Foods.  Whole Foods does not sell Big Food non-organics, so it does not carry Cheerios.  I had to look hard to find the only cereal lower in sugar than the reformulated Purely O’s: Arrowhead Mills Shredded Wheat, Bite Size (2 grams of sugar, 6 grams of fiber, and only 5 mg sodium).  That one, it seems to me, is a much better choice to begin with, pretty much in the same category as oatmeal (1 gram of sugar, 4 of fiber, and 0 mg sodium).  When it comes to cereal, more fiber the better.  Fiber is the point of breakfast cereal.

So I can’t get too upset about the reformulation of Purely O’s.  It’s simply a business decision, entirely to be expected from Big Food.  Cascadian Farms started out with “humble beginnings” as a maker of organic products, none of them cereals.  It was successful enough to be bought first by Small Planet Foods, and later by General Mills, which wanted to get in on the organic market.  Hence: organic Purely O’s.

General Mills is in business to sell cereal, and Purely O’s just didn’t make it past focus groups, as reported in the Boston Globe earlier this year.  General Mills must think there are too few of its deeply loyal customers to matter.  According to a business school case study, it has a history along these lines.  So chalk this one up to corporate imperatives.

Dr. Bender wrote to General Mills and received a reply that said as much:

Our goal is to give consumers quality products at a good value. Prior to introducing any product, extensive consumer testing is done. We conduct market research and product testing continuously to obtain consumer reaction to existing products and to changes being considered. Only when we feel confident that a product change will broaden its appeal will we alter a product’s formulation. We are sorry that you do not agree that the recent change in Cascadian Farm organic Purely O’s cereal was for the better.

If the bloggers are looking for a replacement, try oatmeal or those cute little bite-sized shredded wheat things.

I could not go to the Federal Trade Commission’s December 15 forum on food marketing to children (see previous post), but from all reports I missed quite a show.

Officials of four federal agencies involved in food and food regulation – FTC, FDA, USDA, and CDC – released the results of their collaborative efforts to set standards for marketing foods to kids through an Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children.  Congress established this group through the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act.  It specified that the group was to set up standards for identifying foods that should not be marketed to children and to publish them by July 15, 2010.

And what standards did the four agencies come up with?  Here are the working group’s recommendations:

Take a look at these “Tentative Proposed Standards for Marketing Food to Children 2-17” and decide for yourself whether they are even remotely meaningful.

The Standards are divided into three categories: Standard 1 is real (largely unprocessed) foods with no added sweeteners or functional ingredients.  These could be marketed to children with no further scrutiny.

Foods that do not meet Standard 1 would be required to meet both Standards 2 and 3 in order to be marketed to children.

Standard 2 applies to foods that “must provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet” in one of two ways: containing 50% by weight of real foods (Option A), or by containing defined amounts of some useful nutrients per RACC (Option B).  RACC is a new term to me.  Apparently, it means “reference amount customarily consumed.”   I have no idea what these are but let’s call them serving size.

And what about the cut points?  No foods marketed to children can exceed Standard 3 (“nutrients to limit”):

• Saturated fat: 1 gram or less per serving and not more than 15% of calories
• Trans fat: less than half a gram per serving
• Sugar: no more than 13 grams per serving
• Sodium: no more than 200 mg per serving (equivalent to half a gram of salt)

Got that?  It’s enough to make me weep.

Apparently, the agencies did not give examples of products that might qualify or not, so you have to do your own work on this.  So that leaves me with some questions about the tentative proposed standards:

• Which products qualify and which do not?  It looks to me like the criteria will continue to permit the marketing of questionably nutritious products to kids.  Sugary kids’ breakfast cereals should easily qualify; most do not contain more than 13 grams of sugars per serving or more than 200 mg sodium.
• What is the definition of RACC?  I don’t see a definition in the document.  Without a definition, are companies permitted to define serving sizes for themselves and, maybe, reduce the stated serving size to meet the standards?
• Is there any accountability for meeting the standards?  The entire program is voluntary. Alas, we have already had years of experience with industry “self-regulation” and know that it does not work.

This is the best government agencies could come up with?  I see this as further evidence for the need to stop companies from marketing foods to kids.  Period.

Or am I missing something?

The FTC forum on food marketing to kids takes place tomorrow, December 15.  Recall that the industry-sponsored Children’s Food and Beverage Initiative says the industry doesn’t need regulation, as its self-regulation policies are working just fine.

The research, alas, says otherwise.  According to a report released today, self-regulation is a joke.  An independent investigation of industry marketing-to-kids practices, by Dale Kunkel and his colleagues from the University of Arizona, concludes:

• Most ads for foods produced by self-regulating companies are for junk foods
• Ads for healthy foods are virtually non-existent
• Licensed cartoon characters are increasingly used to market junk foods to kids
• At least a quarter of junk food ads come from companies that do not self-regulate
• Improvements are negligible

Senator Tom Harkin, who has been introducing legislation to restrict children’s food advertising, says he’s disappointed:

The food industry vowed to limit the amount of advertising dollars spent to promote unhealthy foods to children, and focus more on nutritious items.  That’s why I am so discouraged by this report out today.  When private interests work against the public good, government is obliged to act. We need to examine this issue more closely and figure what needs to be done to achieve balance on the airwaves so that we can improve the health and wellness of our children.

Jeffrey Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy, points out that he, Kathryn Montgomery of the Center for Communications at American University, and Lori Dorfman of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, have been studying the way food companies advertise on the Internet.  Kathryn Montgomery will be presenting their conclusions from a series of papers examining digital advertising, along with some more recent examples of food marketing to kids in action.

The food industry’s job is to sell more food, not less.  Because restrictions on advertising are not in industry’s best interest, it is unreasonable to expect self-regulation to work.  That is why we need government to get in there and establish some checks and balances.  The forum should be interesting.  I’m hoping it will lead to FTC action.  Maybe it will even get some of Harkin’s colleagues to do some real work on this issue.  Fingers crossed!

Update, December 15: Here’s what The FTC released at the forum – standards for the kinds of products that food companies can market to children.  These look good but are voluntary. Good enough? I don’t think so.  And here’s a report on what happened.