A Marketing Windfall in Dietary Guidelines

Prepare for an onslaught of no-added-sugar products. Food marketers have had more than a year to prepare for new dietary guidelines that formalize America’s growing aversion to sugar. And they provide a treasure map to a marketing windfall. Fresh new health claims are already emerging.

Nutrition VP Jaime Schwartz Cohen of Ketchum Public Relations tells Advertising Age that the guidelines tell consumers what to eat, not what to avoid:

The way it’s framed now it’s more understandable. We know that messages that are more positive in nature are more motivating.

Dietary guidance of the 1980s brought a tight focus on “low-fat living” and spawned innovations like fat-free candy, juicy McLean hamburgers, Snackwell cookies, and potato chips with fat that passed right though to the toilet.

Now healthy fats are our friends and sugar is “toxic.” Worries about “watered-down” guidance is for bureaucratic wimps, food policy pundits, and politicians torn between special interests — like food producers — and the public interest. Food producers have mostly gotten over their whining and have moved on to developing new formulations and new health claims that line up with the new guidelines.

The beauty of dietary guidelines is this: consumers respond by eating more of whatever the guidelines proclaim to be healthy. It’s a growth opportunity fueled by health claims.

Coming soon to a pantry near you.

Click here for more from Advertising Age.

Featured Photo Above: No Added Sugar Shortbread by Paterson’s Scottish Bakers

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January 14, 2016