With a generational shift in how we think about food, has our love for packaged and processed favourites grown stale?
For three weeks this winter, passersby on Toronto’s busy Queen Street West encountered twentysomethings in black toques and flannel shirts on the sidewalk, beckoning them into a pop-up restaurant with offers of free soup.
Inside, rows of visitors gathered at beer-hall-style tables in a bright, airy, art gallery-like space. Not for the first time, stacks of cans bearing the iconic Campbell’s logo acted as the art, arranged in tastefully contrasting colours to make a wall-spanning letter C.
Cantina by Campbell’s is an example of experiential marketing, one that the company plainly admits is intended to remind millennials of its existence. Reaching this demographic is vital for the soup company. Campbell’s profits have flatlined over the past six years, a trend coinciding with younger consumers redefining home cooking and turning away from so-called “Big Food.”
Arecent study by the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity revealed a country losing its appetite for mass-marketed food. Altogether just 30 per cent of Canadians think the food industry is “moving in the right direction.” As a sector, in fact, processed food lost US$18-billion of domestic market share between 2009 and 2015. Shoppers, it seems, have grown more dubious about eating things that come out of a factory. “I would think of them like melting icebergs,” Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow told Fortune magazine last year after crunching the numbers. “Every year they become a little less relevant.”
There’s a long list of reasons why under-45 consumers don’t trust packaged and processed foods: an over-reliance on the demonized trio of salt, sugar, fat; chemicals; colours; preservatives, and the manufacturing practices themselves, which can be ethically and environmentally questionable. They’re also concerned about long- term health effects, and see potential dangers, even a whiff of immorality, in chemical ingredients.
This slide from “mmm mmm good” to “uh oh scary” has left food marketers scrambling to cater to the finicky preferences of shoppers who embrace the “eat real food” ethos of author Michael Pollan. Typically well-educated, middle-class, young and urban, these consumers shop around the edges of the supermarket for fresh items while largely shunning the shelving in the middle with its rows of cans, bottles and boxes — a course so pronounced that some in the grocery business now refer to the middle of the store as “the morgue.”
Consumers have equally low confidence in manufactured “real food,” like genetically modified salmon ( so- called “frankenfish”), which may now be sold without additional labelling. Trust has also been eroded by a recent proposal from Health Canada to allow the sale of irradiated beef, which is disinfected using energy blasts similar to X-rays.
Dave Fusaro, editor-in-chief of Illinois-based trade magazine Food Processing, says what he’s witnessing in the kitchens of the next generation appears especially bleak for food processors. “I go into my adult children’s fridges and I see stuff in there I don’t recognize,” says the 59-year-old, who has covered the food industry since the early 1990s. “They’re still drinking milk and (eating) ketchup, but it’s organic ketchup and it’s almond milk. And they probably go into my fridge and think, ‘My God, how haven’t you died of cancer?’”
How different things were 50 or 60 years ago, when processed food seemed modern; miraculous, even. Instead of the hassle and expense of homemade meals, processed foods were quick, affordable, predictably uniform and specially engineered to be tasty and nutritious. As journalist Michael Moss so entertainingly chronicled in the 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, “Just heat and serve” went from being a breathless headline on a 1959 Time magazine article to describing a new and almost universal way of seeing food preparation.
However, concerns about mass-produced foods were creeping up even then. The organic food movement was already taking shape, and by 1965, the late author Elspeth Huxley was acknowledging controversy over factory foods in her book Brave New Victuals: An Inquiry into Modern Food Production. According to Huxley, people considered “synthetic chemicals in our husbandry … either to be the tools of the devil, or weapons of enlightenment.” Half a century later, that debate is changing the way the mainstream shops. On a visit to a discount grocery store with the National Post, food activist Andrea Donsky scans the colour- saturated cereal aisle, her censorious eye on the lookout for any product that might contain certain feared ingredients — glucose- fructose, genetically modified grain, food colouring. Any of these would disqualify the cereal from infiltrating the breakfast bowls of her three children.
“For many years we would pick up a product and look at the nutrition facts,” Donsky says. Now she looks at the ingredients first, which “tell a different story.” Looking at a box of muesli, Donsky explains what she coaches others to do through her own website, Naturally Savvy, a revenue- generating content hub for concerned eaters.
“I want to take out the ingredients that I don’t feel very good about, or that I know according to the research have caused harm or some kind of a negative impact,” she says. “To me, if there’s even a shadow of a doubt that an ingredient can cause harm to my body, I stay away.”
It wasn’t long ago that large food producers were defensive or evasive when it came to critiques of their products and the ingredients within. Donsky witnessed that attitude from the inside, having worked in marketing at Smucker’s. But over the past few years, consumer advocates have figured out how to organize online and force producers to nix ingredients and methods that the healthconscious find objectionable.
Consumer petitions have prompted companies including Subway, Starbucks and Coca- Cola to remove dyes and other contentious ingredients from their recipes. Just last year, Canadians took particular interest when Kraft announced the removal of dyes from its famously orange Dinner.
“The last two years have the most changes for sure,” Donsky says. “Consumers are waking up.”
Catering to people like Donsky has seemingly become the main focus of Big Food boardrooms in 2016, as evidenced by the buzzy phrase of the moment in the packaged food industry: clean label. The term refers to labels free of ingredients that would prevent certain consumers from dropping the pack- age into the shopping cart.
“The food companies have been trying to figure out how to make the food meet the expectations of consumers in terms of how it looks, how it tastes, how long it lasts … without offending their senses in terms of putting things in it that they wouldn’t recognize,” says Kantha Shelke, who has a Ph.D. in cereal chemistry and is the principal of a Chicago-based food science and research firm called Corvus Blue.
Donsky and Shelke agree that North Americans could return to the beloved brands of the 20th century, but only if the industry embraces transparency pertaining to ingredients and processes. “Transparency is next to godliness,” Shelke says. “I think consumers would give them a second chance, because they love their food.”
Meanwhile, large food manufacturers have been buying up smaller makers of natural foods. In 2014, General Mills bought Annie’s Inc., best known for its organic macaroni and cheese. Campbell’s has acquired Plum Organics, a maker of baby food and Bolthouse Farms, which specializes in fresh juices, and Garden Fresh Naturals, which makes produce-section salsa. For some of the old guard North American food producers, these newer goodfor-you brands are some of the fastest-growing in the business, and investors have viewed them as signals for optimism.
“What these companies want,” says Fusaro, “is a piece of the all- natural, organic action.” He compares the situation to the beer industry, where major brewers have responded to losing market share to smaller, trendier “craft” breweries by simply buying them up and sucking in the profits. Consumers who wouldn’t be caught dead sipping a Labatt Blue may nevertheless order a pint of beer from formerly independent Mill Street; either way the proceeds trickle up to giant beer conglomerate Anheuser-Busch In-Bev.
Likewise, according to Fusaro, “If Campbell’s buys some little niche soup company that makes organic soups with non- GMO ingredients, and sources the ingredients locally or something like that, wouldn’t you, as a millennial, buy that?”
While presenting consumers with products that possess a cleaner image may help turn things around for food producers, they also have to respond to younger consumers simply eating and thinking of food differently than the previous generations.
Thanks to the Instagram factor — the tendency on the part of younger consumers to share their food over social media — meals have become, in part, a semi-public performance. This is a major challenge for the packaged goods sector, because a plain old bowl of chicken soup isn’t much of a performance.
Market research of young consumers show that many don’t consider a meal complete until they’ve given it their own finishing touches, ideally with fresh ingredients, says Darren Seifer, a food industry analyst for the NPD Group in New York. “The notion of convenience for millennials seems to be, ‘How do I get out of the kitchen just as quickly as anyone else, but leaving with a fresh item?’”
However, this doesn’t necessarily translate into them cooking more meals from scratch. In fact, industry research has shown that 20-to29-year-olds do this less than any other age cohort. There was even a recent report that said cereal sales are plummeting because millennials think cleaning up a bowl and a spoon is more onerous than stopping for a muffin or another no-fuss option on the way to work.
Not surprisingly, the food industry is finding it difficult to develop and sell products to a generation who say they want one thing (like freshly prepared meals) but who are actually doing other things (like eating fast food). But parsing these mixed signals is leading to some insights about the lazy-yet-Instagrammable freshness millennials seem to crave. A report by Deloitte on younger consumers’ food preferences said three-quarters of American young adults would be interested in pre- chopped vegetables and other cheats for fresh meals. They would also be more likely than older generations to buy pre-made meal kits or have semi-prepared meals delivered to their homes.
Enter the Campbell’s Real Soups line, which are “soup bases” in a carton that consumers can transform in their own kitchens, tossing in proteins and veggies to make, for example, a vegetarian ramen, or a Thai chicken and rice khao soi — as demonstrated at the Campbell’s popup in Toronto.
The idea, says Ana Dominguez, president of Campbell’s Canada, was to portray the Real Soup products as “modern and trendy, but also easy.” Participants were given not just cans of soup when they departed, but also recipes — by local chef Matt Dean Pettit, of the hip Toronto restaurant Rock Lobster — and meal kits that offered instructions on how to combine Campbell’s with fresh items to produce a meal.
Nicole Bodnar, 30, was one of at least 16,500 people ( according to Campbell’s) who visited Campbell’s Cantina. As Campbell’s market research would have predicted, Bodnar says the soup brand evokes a warm nostalgia for childhood. “I have a lot of memories of eating Campbell’s Soup with grilled cheese, so there is a lot of those homestyle, wholesome … types of memories,” she says.
But when asked about the last time she actually bought a Campbell’s product, she ventures: “Within the last two years? Maybe a year ago, or a year and a half ago.” It was “probably a minestrone.” She can’t be sure. Bodnar says she might try some of the suggested soups and recipes because some of them start with a packaged product but incorporate fresh ingredients as well. “It kind of makes the nutrition- conscious folk feel a little bit better.”
Still, with a lingering wariness, she says she’s particularly receptive to the idea of adding your own chicken or beef, “Because what the hell is in canned meat?”
How Big Food is coping with a massive shift in how we think about food By Adam McDowell