SWEET! How food and drink brands can respond to the sugar debate.

The food industry has always been swept by scandals and fears, from saturated fat, to salt, to sugar and back again. Last month I braved acronyms, graphs and no small amount of nutritional science to attend FDIN’s conference on the implications of SACN's “Carbohydrates and Health” report, and it provided some guidance on how the sugar debate is likely to impact our industry.

SACN – The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition – was set up to advise the government on nutritional matters, and it’s latest report on Carbohydrates and Health is now being considered by the government. Clearly, SACN’s conclusions will be balanced against a range of other political interests, and government recommendations will be diluted, but this report will be highly influential in the years ahead. 

My view is that concerns about sugar are not just another food craze, because of the links between sugar, obesity, and diabetes. The stakes are high – diabetes alone costs the UK ￡10bn per year and if this continues to rise our healthcare system will be bankrupted. SACN are proposing a drastic transformation of the British diet to help us lead healthier lives. For instance, they are suggesting that men should reduce their sugar intake from 68g on average to 30g, women from 50g to 30g. The diet they propose looks like this:

Source - Professor Ian Macdonald
I know people that eat likes this – but there aren’t many of them, and they’re all health conscious, well educated, and tend to be middle class. We were told that this reflects the diet of the healthiest 1% of the population. This is a huge marketing challenge. Imagine that you are marketing a product with 1% penetration, say Coconut Water for the sake of argument - and your marketing director asked you to increase that to 100%. “Impossible!” you might respond “it can’t be done”. And even if it could be done, the goal is not to sell one product, but to replace most elements in the public’s diet with healthier alternatives. And by the way, to achieve this many people will need learn how to cook again. This is an unprecedented marketing challenge, which is likely to take decades to complete.

If we are going to change the British diet radically, it will have big implications for our food industry. If you’re in a sector that is directly impacted - such as sweet snacks or fruit juice – demand for your products may continue to fall as long as the negative publicity about sugar continues. Your challenge will be to innovate alternative products that have lower sugar levels, either by reformulating with sweeteners, or by creating new, less sweet products. This will raise some questions for your brand. If you’ve previously been highly indulgent, new, less sweet lines may not fit naturally with your positioning, and using sweeteners instead of sugar may undermine the credibility of your brand.

Not all businesses are impacted so directly. If you make savoury snacks, you’re probably relieved that the spotlight of the media is now pointing somewhere else, and you may benefit from increased demand as consumers switch sweet for savoury. If you’re making added value culinary foods, for instance pasta sauces, you’ll need to reformulate lines with high sugar levels, while expecting a consumer shift towards healthier lines. It’s important to bear in mind that SACN also recommend a significant increase in dietary fibre, and there’s an opportunity here for many food manufacturers to support his.

For retailers, the strategic situation is interesting. On one hand, they can make money selling anything, and so it is easier for them to switch the selection of foods they offer – we’re already seeing confectionary free checkouts in Tesco and Aldi, and if the trend continues we might well see ‘no added sugar’ aisles developing. Tesco have rejected brands like Ribena and using the associated PR to improve their perception in the eyes of consumers. On the other hand, value added food products from pasta sauces to Coco Pops have been big drivers of profit for the retailers, and if the nation moves to a diet of mung beans it will be much harder for the retailers to thrive. So it will be important for their food suppliers to reformulate their products in a way that is appealing for the mass market if the whole supply chain is to succeed.

So what are the big implications for marketers?
1. Strategy: Your consumers have changed – the attitudinal segmentation you created last year is going out of date faster than you might imagine. If you believe, as I do, that sugar concerns are a long term impact on the food market, you will need a consumer strategy that understands consumer attitudes to sugar, and a plan for your brands that takes account of this.
2. Branding: It’s harder to maintain a coherent fit between brand and product when the product changes. Your innovation should always support the long term vision of the brand. If your innovation becomes a reaction to the sugar debate, you’ll need to think hard about the impact on your brand positioning, to help consumers believe in what you’re doing.
3. Innovation: there are two questions:
a. Reformulation What’s the best way to reformulate your products? What’s the best way of positioning your new ingredients? This is something that the Cola market has wrestled with, leading to a complex Diet / Zero / Max / Life consumer conundrum. Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbells in the USA, has already referred to the “mounting distrust of so-called Big Food, the large food companies and legacy brands on which millions of consumers have relied on for so long”. As we digest the impact of the Volkswagen scandal, it seems decreasingly likely that we will believe the guy in the suit when he tells us that the magic sweet ingredient is good for us. 
b. New, Less Sweet Products How can you make less sweet alternatives appealing? What words and semiotic codes help consumers understand that a product is desirable without sweetness?
While Public Health England consider their response to the SACN report, and advise government on what measures are required, we believe that the actions above will help you position your brand for success in a fast changing environment.

With thanks to Jeffrey Hyman, FDIN, and Professor Ian Macdonald for their thought provoking debate at the FDIN conference. https://www.fdin.org.uk/