The US food industry has stepped up its efforts to tackle obesity. Is this good corporate citizenship or reaction to a more hands-on White House?

When he took office, Barack Obama made tackling childhood obesity a priority and since then the US food industry has ramped up its own efforts around the issue. The question is the degree to which the former precipitated the latter.

Food companies say their commitment was already in evidence and the administration’s engagement was simply a rallying cry to take things to a new level. Campaigners suggest Obama’s interest has meant greater scrutiny by government agencies, forcing industry to raise its game.

Certainly there is evidence that a more hands-on focus by policymakers on children’s food advertising and nutritional labelling has prompted industry action.

In July 2011, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a coalition of 16 major food companies, announced the introduction of standardised nutritional criteria. Previously, CFBAI members each made their own specific pledges.

The move came as an interagency working group (known as the IWG) comprising four government agencies was considering the creation of official government guidelines. Though voluntary, the proposed guidelines were stricter than the enhanced CFBAI criteria and were opposed both by the food industry and Republican politicians who accused the administration of government overreach.

Watered-down proposals

In fact, once the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 mid-term elections, political opposition to the working group’s efforts hardened and the chances of the mooted guidelines being put before Congress receded. In October 2011, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the lead agency on the issue, said it was making “significant revisions” to its original proposals, which would “go a long way to address industry’s concerns and share much in common with the new CFBAI uniform nutrition standards”.

CFBAI director Elaine Kolish says the CFBAI criteria show the industry’s “commitment to dynamic self-regulation that can grow and evolve as the marketplace changes”. Underlining the flexibility and speed self-regulation offers, they are “more realistic and achievable” than those proposed by the IWG and are pledged to be in place by the end of 2013, ahead of the target date discussed by the government agencies.

Kolish concedes that the IWG’s work was “a catalyst of sorts”, but believes the member companies would have moved towards standardised criteria in time. “I think these companies have a commitment to corporate social responsibility generally, and are very engaged on a lot of different types of initiatives that demonstrate that commitment. Participation in CFBAI is one sterling example of that,” Kolish says.

Campaigners remain less convinced. Dr Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at consumer advocacy group the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, says that while the industry has made progress on marketing to children, “that progress has been quite modest”.

The CFBAI estimates its new guidelines would affect about a third of products currently being marketed directly to children, whereas the IWG guidelines would have affected 80% of products.

Nutritional labelling

Just as the debate over children’s advertising appears to be cooling, front-of-pack nutritional labelling has returned to the agenda. In 2009, Dr Margaret Hamburg, Obama-appointed  commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), publicly criticised a newly launched industry-sponsored front-of-pack programme called Smart Choices, which as a result was soon scrapped.

In the intervening time, the FDA has commissioned research by the Institute of Medicine into front-of-pack labelling, the second phase of which was published in October 2011, while food companies have gone back to the drawing-board.

During 2011, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), the trade body representing US food producers, and the Food Marketing Institute, which represents retailers, unveiled a new front-of-pack scheme called Facts Up Front, which is now being rolled out.

The GMA’s Sean McBride believes Facts Up Front shows how the industry is engaging on dietary health issues. “It’s one important part of a multi-faceted campaign to support better health and wellness among our consumers,” he says.

Kim Nelson, senior vice-president for external relations at food giant General Mills, describes the scheme as “a sensible, fact-based approach to providing the kind of information we think consumers want to see to help them make better choices about what they’re eating”.

However, Wootan says the launch of Facts Up Front was a “pre-emptive” move aimed at forestalling action by the FDA. “Avoiding regulation is not the focus of our efforts in health and wellness or corporate social responsibility,” McBride insists.

It is not clear what the FDA’s next move will be but if Facts Up Front receives official endorsement and moves towards establishing a government scheme are not followed through, it would be a significant fillip for the industry’s efforts.

While increased scrutiny may have prompted the industry to go further on labelling and advertising, to suggest that Obama was gunning for the food industry when he took office would be inaccurate. His major reform of food safety legislation was broadly supported by industry, and while the reauthorisation of the Child Nutrition Act (the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act 2010) included improved standards for school food that NGOs had been campaigning for, it also included notable concessions to industry, not least the continued classification of pizza as, remarkably, a vegetable.

Throughout the course of the IWG process and in the FDA’s work on nutritional labelling, there has been constant dialogue with industry. In fact, it could be said that the administration has taken an inclusive approach to tackling the obesity issue, which is most notably shown in  Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, launched in February 2010.

Let’s Move

While reluctant to concede that its moves on labelling and children’s advertising were prompted by government action, industry advocates are happier to characterise the first lady’s multi-stranded anti-obesity platform, which welcomed the involvement of food companies from its inception, as a catalyst for enhanced corporate engagement.

McBride says the industry was “thrilled” when Michelle Obama made childhood obesity her lead issue and “fully supports” the campaign’s goal of solving childhood obesity within a generation.

The past few years have seen “a more rapid pace and some really innovative changes” in industry activity, McBride says, and “some of the catalyst for this was Michelle Obama’s rallying cry to challenge the industry to go farther and faster to give consumers what they need to achieve a healthier diet”. However, he stresses that this represents a continuation of the industry’s existing commitment.

While campaigners and public health agencies often single out certain types of food as problematic, the industry naturally prefers to view the problem primarily as one of energy balance – calories in vs calories out. Nelson believes a “powerful” aspect to the Let’s Move campaign is the emphasis it places on physical activity. “There’s a lot of NGO focus on the product piece and the consumption choices and appropriately so, but there probably hasn’t been as much attention on the physical fitness side, which is equally important,” she says.

Doug VanDeVelde, senior vice-president for cereals marketing and innovation at Kellogg, echoes this view. A key element in the industry’s engagement on diet and health is “really encouraging consumers to take a calories in/calories out approach to a healthy lifestyle”, he says.

Citing Kellogg’s participation in the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation’s Together Counts campaign and partnerships with Disney aimed at encouraging children to participate in sports, VanDeVelde says: “While we’re doing everything we can to make the calories in as nutritious and healthy as possible if we want to be practical the real way to solve this is to combine that with a lot more efforts around calories out.”

Fostering partnerships between different sectors is a strength of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a CEO-led compact set up by several major food companies in 2009, according to its president, Lisa Gable.

By the same token, Nelson believes the multistakeholder approach embodied by Let’s Move to be one of its strengths. “I think there’s an increasing recognition that the obesity challenge we’re facing in the US and globally is complex, it’s multifactoral, it’s going to require more than just one sector. I think all the various sectors will have to work together to create meaningful movement.”

In these debates, companies often stress the advantage their direct relationship with consumers gives them over generic public health promotion.

VanDeVelde says: “A nutritious food is not nutritious unless it gets eaten. You can make the uber-healthiest food possible but if parents don’t like it or kids don’t eat it, then it doesn’t really do anyone any good. That’s why the consumer at the centre is so important.”

Campaigners naturally counter that while industry may have particular insights, in other ways it has vested interests that could conflict with the public health agenda.

Campaigners also frequently point to the millions of dollars spent on lobbying in Washington. The industry lobbied “very aggressively” on the issue of children’s marketing in particular, Wootan says. Nelson, meanwhile, says it is “entirely appropriate” for the industry to “defend products that ought to be defended” and “to be active in sharing the facts about their products”.

Home truths

The experience in the US over the past three and a half years demonstrates some home truths. Notwithstanding McBride’s contention that the food industry has “a good track-record” on diet and health issues “going back decades”, it suggests that even the remote possibility of regulatory intervention can concentrate the mind wonderfully. And that while enhanced self-regulation can help win over policymakers, spending a few million dollars here and there on lobbying certainly does no harm.

It also arguably shows the enduring effectiveness of the carrot and stick approach. The FDA’s chastening of Smart Choices led to the industry coming up with a labelling scheme, which is a significant improvement. Meanwhile, even the tentative proposal of government guidelines on children’s advertising has produced a reform of self-regulation that would have taken campaigners years to win.

In parallel, and entirely appropriately in a discussion about healthier diets, the administration has offered an abundant supply of carrots in the form of engagement in the Let’s Move campaign. If food companies needed more incentive to become part of the solution, Let’s Move provided it.

Part of the reason for this administration appearing a little heavy-handed with the food sector at the outset may have stemmed from comparisons with the preceding administration, which had taken an extremely laissez-faire approach to diet and health issues.

But keen to stress that the industry actions have not been a reaction to government cajoling, McBride says its commitment “is ongoing and not subject to transient political changes in the domestic environment”.

Obesity – the facts

• According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 33.8% of adults in the US are obese, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, having risen from around 23% over past 20 years.
• In 2000, no state had an obesity prevalence of 30% or higher. In 2010, 12 states had an obesity prevalence of 30% or higher, 36 had a prevalence of 25% or more, and no state had a prevalence less than 20%.
• Since 1980, obesity prevalence among children and adolescents has almost tripled.  Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged between two and 19 years are obese.
• In 2008, medical costs associated with obesity were estimated at $147bn.

Advertising reformulation

The Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative was launched in 2006 with 10 participating companies. Now it comprises 16 leading food and beverage producers.

Between 2004 and 2010 advertisements for:

• cookies fell by 99%
• soft drinks fell by 96%
• confectionery fell by 68%

• snacks fell by 71%
• frozen and refrigerated pizza fell by 95%
• fruit and vegetable juices increased by 199%