Currently browsing posts about: Marketing to kids

Formula companies must be desperate for sales.  They are spending four times what they used to on advertising of “toddler milk,” formula ostensibly aimed at children who no longer need infant formula and are perfectly capable of eating real food.

So says a new study in the journal Public Health Nutrition.  The study comes from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, now at the University of Connecticut in Hartford, a group specializing in research to inform policy.

The report points out that increasing sales of toddler formula come at a time when pediatric authorities specifically recommend against feeding toddler milks to young children.

Why?  Because young kids do not need them and the milks contain unnecessary added sugars.

As the paper points out, “These findings also support the need to regulate marketing of toddler milks in countries that prohibit infant formula marketing to consumers.”

The advertising of toddler milks gets around those policies and should stop.  Right now.

Coming soon to a supermarket near you: Baby Shark cereal.

I am so out of it.  I never heard of the song, Baby Shark, before seeing this story about Kellogg’s new cereal—aimed at toddlers.

The song, I gather, is adored by babies, less so by their parents, but never mind: it is expected to sell lots of cereal.

I searched for a Nutrition Facts label online, but could not find one (the cereal won’t be available until mid-September, apparently.

I did see this at the bottom corner of the box:

One and one-third cup of this stuff provides 150 calories, 190 mg of sodium, and 15 grams of sugars.  Oh great, 40% of calories from sugars.

Another sugary cereal for kids, this one for little kids!

Do food companies market directly to children?  Yes, they do.

It never occurred to me that we needed more research to prove that advertising to kids makes them want food products, pester their parents to buy the products, say they like the products, and actually eat the products.

That was the conclusion of a hugely important study from the Institute of Medicine in 2006.

You can download that report from the link.  It’s still worth reading.

Obviously, the points it made still need reinforcing.  Hence: this study.

Exposure to Child-Directed TV Advertising and Preschoolers. Intake of Advertised Cereals. Jennifer A. Emond, Meghan R. Longacre, Keith M. Drake, et al.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine, December 17, 2018.

The authors measured whether exposure to TV advertisements for kids’ breakfast cereals affected pre-schoolers’ intake of those cereals.

No surprise.  It did.

In this figure, the dots to the right of the vertical line indicate increased intake of the cereals after exposure to the ads.

I’d say the ads are doing what marketers hope they will do (except for Honey Nut Cheerios).  Ads for Cocoa Pebbles and Fruity Pebbles seem particularly effective.

The authors point out that food companies say they are no longer marketing to children under the age of six.  Obviously, they still are.

This is what parents are up against.  What to do?

Turn off the TV!  Call for regulation!

Nobody should be surprised by the results of the latest WHO report on the lack of progress in curbing the marketing of highly processed junk foods to children.

The report looks at marketing policies across WHO Europe’s member countries.  The data show that while about half the countries have taken some steps to limit junk food marketing to kids, even these steps do not go nearly far enough.

Actions focus mainly on

• Advertising but ignore other methods for reaching children.
• Children up to age 12 or 13, but not others.

The report notes the need for more consistent definitions and regulations across the various countries, especially with respect to digital media.

The report documents the negative effects of highly processed foods on kids’ health.  It also documents the uphill nature of addressing this problem.

From the standpoint of the food industry, marketing to children in the line in the sand.  They cannot stop marketing to kids and still sell junk foods aimed at kids.

The report provides plenty of evidence for food companies’ prioritizing profit over public health.

This is a collection of articles from the industry newsletter, FoodNavigator.com, about marketing foods to kids—kids’ food.

Really, kids would be much better off eating the healthy foods their parents eat.  They don’t need food aimed just at them.  Much of this is about selling products to busy parents.  Here’s how companies do it.

• FOOD FOR KIDS: Why do so many kids have food allergies, and what can we do about it?: The prevalence of food allergies has increased dramatically over the last 25 years, with infants and children most severely affected. But why? Is it changes in gut bacteria? The so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis’? The rising use of antibiotics? Is prevalence, and in some cases severity, increasing? What do we know, what don’t we know (yet), and what are the next steps in addressing the problem?.. Read
• FOOD FOR KIDS Vox Pop: Parents share their take on food for kids: Parents to young kids face many competing demands for their time. So is sitting down to dinner together a realistic option seven days a week? Is it a daily struggle to get kids to eat healthy?.. Watch now
• FOOD FOR KIDS: A chat with child nutritionists: With kids spending so much of their day in school while also being heavily influenced by their parents’ eating habits, how can we get kids to make healthy food and beverage choices?.. Watch now
• FOOD FOR KIDS: Sitting down with Nurture Life: The ideal situation for families with young children is a sit-down dinner seven days a week, but in many cases that’s just not realistic, says co-founder of Nurture Life Jennifer Chow… Watch now
• FOOD FOR KIDS: How can you earn professional recommendations for your healthy food brand?  ‘Influencers’ are increasingly sought after by brands looking to connect with their target audience via a trusted intermediary, and pediatricians are about as trusted as they come if you’re trying to reach parents of young children. So how can you put your brand at the center of conversations between pediatric professionals and millennial moms and dads?.. Read
• FOOD FOR KIDS: What’s the connection between infant gut bacteria and health outcomes later in life? Babies born in the USA today don’t have the same microbiome as those born 100 years ago, a seemingly innocuous discovery that could prove to be a game-changer in pediatrics, claims one California-based company on a mission to rejuvenate the ‘dysbiotic’ American gut… Read
• Square Baby promises a ‘foolproof way to give your baby 100% daily nutrition’:If not everyone is convinced of the viability of the direct to consumer (D2C) meal kit delivery business, the economics of the subscription model for baby food are much more appealing, claims Square Baby, one of a new wave of D2C brands targeting babies, or more accurately, their stressed and exhausted parents… Read
• $6.7M investment will help RETHINK Brands raise awareness of its kids’ water packed in juice boxes: With the help of a $6.7 million investment led by AccelFoods, the founders of boxed water company RETHINK Brands hope to change how more people think about water and the beverages they send with their children to school, sports practice and other events… Read
• GoGo SqueeZ targets tweens with new BlastZ fruit pouches: BlastZ – the latest innovation from GoGo squeeZ – is designed to attract new consumers to the burgeoning fruit squeezers category by appealing to kids that have outgrown apple sauce but are still looking for a convenient fruit snack, says associate brand manager Dennis Katsnelson… Read

Andrea Curtis.  Eat This!  How Fast-Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back).  Red Deer Press, 2018.

This, amazingly, is a 36-page toolkit for fighting marketing to kids, with endorsements from Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver, among others.

As I read it, it’s a manual for teaching food literacy to kids—teaching them how to think critically about all the different ways food and beverage companies try to get kids to buy their products or pester their parents to do so.

The “fighting back” part takes up just two pages, but it suggests plenty of projects that kids can do:

Do taste tests of fast food and the same thing home made.  “Which one is more delicious, more expensive, more healthy?  Which creates the least amount of waste?”

Watch your favorite show…Mark down how many times you see product placement.”

“Quick: think of all the fast-food mascots you know by name…Who are the mascots aimed at?”

The illustrations are kid-friendly as is the text.  I’m guessing this could be used easily with kids from age 8 on.

The Berkeley Media Studies Group has a new framing brief on food-industry targeting of minority communities, how it works, and what to do about it.

Here’s an illustration from the report:

If you want to stop this sort of thing, here’s how.

FoodNavigator reports that Public Health England is taking on—what a concept!—calories as a means to prevent childhood obesity.

It will be looking at ready-to-serve meals, pizzas, burgers, savory snacks, and sandwiches in an effort to help children cut back on the excess 200-300 calories a day they are currently consuming.

The UK is planning targeted reductions in sugars in processed foods.

The food industry doesn’t like this: bans on advertising sugary foods to kids are “choking the industry.”

I once attended a White House meeting at which I heard representatives of food companies insist that they could not stop marketing to children.  This was their line in the sand.  They had to keep marketing to children to stay in business.

As for the United States, the CDC has just published the latest data on obesity in adults and children.

The trend?  Upward.

Looks like marketing to kids works, and well.

Public health, anyone?