Web Power Forcing Top Manufacturers To Reconsider Ingredients, Labelling & Processing Of Their Products
Renee Shutters has long worried that food dyes — used in candy like blue M&M’s — were harming her son, Trenton. She testified before the Food and Drug Administration, but nothing happened. It wasn’t until she went online, using a petition with the help of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, that her pleas to remove artificial dyes from food seemed to be heard. Mars, the candy’s maker, is now hinting that it may soon replace at least one of the dyes with an alternative derived from seaweed.
“I’ve thought about calling them,” Shutters said about Mars. “I’m not trying to be this horrible person. What I’m thinking is that this is an opportunity for their company to lead what would be an awesome publicity coup by taking these dyes out of their products.”
While the FDA continues to allow certain dyes to be used in foods, deeming them safe, parents and advocacy groups have been using websites and social media as powerful megaphones to force titans of the food industry to reconsider ingredients in their foods and the labeling and processing of their products. In several instances in the last year or so, major food companies and fast-food chains have shifted to colouring derived from spices or other plant-based sources, or changed or omitted certain labels from packaging.
Matthew Egol, a partner at Booz & Company, a consulting firm, said while food companies had benefited from social media to gain insight into trends, data on what products to introduce and which words to use in marketing, they had been the target of complaints that become magnified in an online environment.
Egol said companies were approaching the negative feedback they get with new tools that help them assess the risks posed by consumer criticism. “Instead of relying on a PR firm, you have analytical tools to quantify how big an issue it is and how rapidly it’s spreading and how influential the people hollering are,” he said. “Then you make a decision about how to respond. It happens much more quickly.”
From Cargill’s decision to label packages of its ground beef that contain “pink slime”, or what the industry prefers to call finely textured meat, to PepsiCo’s decision to replace brominated vegetable oil in Gatorade with a natural additive at the behest of a teenager, corporations are increasingly capitulating to consumer demands.
Companies are reluctant to admit a direct connection between the crusades of consumers like Shutters or Vani Hari, a food blogger, and their decisions to tweak products, but the link seems clear. More than 140,000 people have signed Shutters’s petition on petroleum-based food dyes, and dozens havecommented on Hari’s posts about some of the ingredients in items on Chick-fil-A’s menu. Two years ago in a blog post, Hari took issue with some ingredients in a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich, like MSG and some artificial colours. In October 2012, Chick-fil-A invited Hari to its headquarters in Atlanta, where she discussed her concern about some ingredients “We’ve always tried to be customer-focused,” said David B Farmer, vice president for product strategy and development at Chick-fil-A. “What has changed is some of the channels of communications, which wasn’t a factor in the past. We’ve had to adapt to that.” NYT NEWS SERVICE
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