Allies on healthful diet unveil new initiatives
Former first lady Michelle Obama’s legacy is living on as the food industry embraces more-nutritious products.
On Thursday, more than a dozen food companies, including candy maker Mars and convenience chain Cumberland Farms, announced new initiatives with Partnership for a Healthier America, a foundation that Obama chairs and helped found.
The initiatives will deliver smaller candy bars to checkout aisles and more water to gas stations, among other things. They also will provide a rare bright spot to public-health advocates at a time that has seen President Donald Trump’s administration freeze other key parts of the former first lady’s healthy-eating legacy.
In the past two weeks , the Trump administration has stalled nutrition standards for school lunches and delayed rules that require restaurants to label menu calories.
But it seems Trump can’t roll back the former first lady’s continued influence with private companies.
“Washington is Washington, but progress will continue,” said Larry Soler, the chief executive of Partnership for a Healthier America. “We’re proving the private sector can play as big a role as policy change.”
For companies, there are financial and political motivations for making these sorts of changes: Consumers are agitating for more-healthful foods and smaller portions, and voluntary industry-led initiatives can stave off regulation.
For public-health advocates, the partnerships have the potential to get nutritious foods in the marketplace.
Among the largest of the new initiatives is a partnership with PepsiCo, which will al- low Partnership for a Healthier America to audit the company’s 10-year reduction of added sugar, saturated fat and sodium in its food and beverage portfolios. Pepsi has indicated it will make the changes, which will apply to two-thirds of its beverage and three-quarters of its food portfolio, by investing in nutritional product lines.
The candy makers Mars, Nestle, Ferrara, Lindt & Spungli and Ferrero Rocher have promised Partnership for a Healthier America they will cut portion sizes of half their products to 200 calories or less by 2022, and label at least 90 percent with front-of-pack nutrition information.
Separately, the country’s largest convenience chain, Cumberland Farms, has committed to stocking more fresh produce in its 600 locations, and in pricing them competitively against less-healthful options.
And Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks that feed 46 million people, has promised to redesign its distribution system to get member food banks to stock more fruits and vegetables.
In most cases, these partnerships are binding: Partnership for a Healthier America requires that its partners sign legal contracts. In exchange for making, and keeping, these public-health commitments, the foundation provides companies publicity, networking and technical assistance.
In the seven years since Partnership for a Healthier America was introduced, the foundation has partnered with the likes of Wal-Mart, Dannon and Del Monte to cut calories, sugar and sodium from the U.S. food supply. In 2014, it reported, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that 16 of the country’s largest food companies had already axed 6.4 trillion calories from their product lines.