Salt, sugar, fat shunned as food firms go healthier

Twice as many recipe changes as previous year

TORONTO • Packaged food companies and retailers changed the recipes of more than twice the amount of products in 2016 compared with the year before to meet a growing consumer demand for healthier food, according to a new report.

Companies including Walmart, Dole, Smucker’s and PepsiCo altered 179,600 products to reduce the level of ingredients such as salt, sugar and saturated fat in 2016, up from 84,000 reformulations in 2015, according to the Consumer Goods Forum, a non-profit global trade association. The numbers also track a swift upward trajectory from 2014, when 22,500 products had their recipes rejigged.

The most-removed product ingredient cited by manufacturers and retailers in 2016 was sodium, cited by 67 per cent, followed by sugar at 61 per cent and saturated fat at 50 per cent, the report said.

Conversely, whole grains and vitamins were the most likely new ingredients added to boost the nutritional profile of food, at 25 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively.

“Salt and sugar — the two are the new tobaccos” in terms of consumer perception, said Sylvain Charlebois, agriculture expert and dean of management at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

“The centre of the store is changing. Health and wellbeing are aspects that consumers are looking for (in products) and those will occupy the centre store more in the future and that also plays into the grocers’ own strategies around private labels,” he said. “And because the line between food service and food retail is blurring, grocers are trying to take advantage of that trend of offering consumers ready-toeat, healthy products.”

That has played out at Loblaw Cos., which has converted dozens of its Shoppers Drug Mart stores across the country to incorporate fresh convenience food. While Shoppers has long been a convenience destination for packaged snacks, there has been significant fresh food growth at the drug and cosmetics retailer.

“We have strong growth pretty much across the board in the front store at Shoppers Drug Mart,” Loblaw chief executive Galen Weston told investors on the company’s third-quarter conference call last November.

“We think part of what is driving that is the enhanced (fresh) food proposition that may actually be driving more traffic, more visits,” and that volume seemed to lead to higher sales in other categories, he said.

“Where we see really, really significant success in adding fresh food is in the urban market.”

Beyond catering to consumers’ desire to eat healthier, the trend highlights the response from grocery retailers and food manufacturers to the so-called “centre-store erosion” in grocery stores, a phenomenon that has seen consumers eschew packaged goods in favour of fresh food and the ready-to eat foods on the periphery of the stores.

Sales of packaged foods have been tepid in Canada for years, growing at a combined annual rate of 2.4 per cent per annum between 2011 and 2016, according to market research firm Euromonitor.

Retailers and manufacturers are increasingly teaming up in order to influence communities “across a broad and more holistic set of health indicators,” the Consumer Goods Forum report noted.

“We aim to oversee the design and execution of several collaborative pilots to test the hypothesis that retailers and manufacturers can jointly create healthier practices and help people live healthier lives.”

Cereal in particular has been a hard-hit packaged food category as more consumers eat on the run in the morning and look for more portable and protein-rich breakfast options.

In response, packaged goods makers have been adding protein to breakfast and snack bars.

The Consumer Goods Forum is comprised of about 400 members including retailers, manufacturers and consumer service businesses.