Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - "Three key factors drive the rise of low-carb diets" from a BUSINESS site!

http://www.new-nutrition.com/editorialcont2.asp
Here's an excerpt...

"
Reflect on this a moment. A deceased seventy-one year old doctor with maverick ideas about nutrition and health has helped wipe almost €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) off the value of the stock of the world’s third-biggest food company.

It may seem hardly credible to many in the food and beverage industries, but Unilever has attributed the woes of its Slim-Fast meal replacement brand – whose sales fell 13% in the 52 weeks to May this year – to the increasing impact of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets popularised by diet guru the late Dr. Atkins. Unilever further revealed that lower expectations for the Slim-Fast line were largely responsible for the decision to slash the 2003 sales forecast for its 400 top brands.

And as if to drive the point home, the biggest percentage gainer of sales among the top 10 meal-replacement-beverage brands in the U.S. in the same period was the Atkins Diet brand itself, which saw sales grow by more than 95% in the year to May.

The warning, issued by a U.S.-based group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, came in response to the diet’s spiralling popularity with Americans - an estimated 35 million Americans are trying to reduce carb intake. And it’s not just Americans who are turning to the low-carb plan. Such is its popularity among Brits that UK wheat industry interests have joined the anti-Atkins chorus, issuing a survey of dietitians that condemned the Atkins Diet as "bad dietary advice". In Norway, too, the popularity of a low-carb regime advocated by Dr. Fedon Lindberg, Norway’s very own answer to Atkins, has reportedly swept potatoes, pasta and white breads off Norwegian plates and sent sales of dairy products, pulses, whole grains, and nuts soaring.
From these (for Unilever) painful facts marketers everywhere can take some comfort, for it shows that even the mighty Unilever, with its unquestioned prowess in market research and brand management, can sometimes misread a market.

*** Three key factors have driven – and will continue to drive - the popularity of the low-carb approach to weight management. These are: effectiveness, the power of word-of-mouth communications and emerging science.***

{snip}

*** No doubt we will see Unilever take aggressive steps to re-build Slim-Fast and set it back on the path to growth, but 2003 will go down in the annals as the year we all learnt to take low-carb seriously. ***

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