Kraft cooks up a plan to avoid obesity lawsuits

DAVID OLIVE, Toronto Star, Jul. 5, 2003. 01:00 AM

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How serious is Kraft Foods Inc. about getting kids hooked on Big & Juicy Smokie franks?

Well, often as not, the Kraft company "Hotdoggers" who cross the continent in Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles are recent college graduates. A good ground-floor training for future executives, you might say. But also a sign that the world's second-largest food company takes no chances in putting the United States' best and brightest into the field to develop among young people a lasting affection for a product whose 220 calories per serving are fully 10 per cent of the government-recommended daily caloric intake for the average adult American.

As it happens, Kraft will mark its centenary this year by, among other things, voluntarily banishing its Weinermobiles from the schoolyards of America.

In an announcement that stunned the $1 trillion (U.S.) food industry this week, Kraft vowed to reduce portion sizes, develop healthier products and scrap its extensive in-school marketing programs.

It's Kraft's response to the "obesity crisis," an effort to get ahead of its rivals and position itself as the industry leader in encouraging healthier diets. And to pre-empt a nascent but potentially devastating consumer, legal and regulatory assault on Kraft's perceived culpability in America's penchant for living large.

A couple of prominent Canadian émigrés figure in this drama.

In his 1958 classic, The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith warned: "More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."

He'd be even more right about that today. About two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. And 25 per cent of people under 19 fit into that category — a doubling over the past 30 years.

The original of the latest diet-based scare, in 1999, was the U.S. surgeon-general's assertion that, with 300,000 deaths per year related to overweight and obesity, unhealthy diets were implicated in almost as many preventable deaths as smoking. More recently, the surgeon-general estimated that weight problems are a $117 billion tax on the economy in soaring health-care costs.

Central to the crisis are the eating habits of kids.

In January, Dutch researchers published one of the first large-scale studies to quantify the long-established pattern of premature death from being overweight or obese. In The Annals Of Internal Medicine, the University of Groningen researchers estimatedthe lives of overweight people are shortened on average by about three years. The figure rises to 13.7 years for obese males who also smoke.

The most alarming stat, though, was the long-term effects of bad eating habits in a person's early years. "This study is saying that if you are overweight by your mid-30s to mid-40s, even if you lose some weight later on, you still carry a higher risk of dying," Dr. Serge Jabbour, director of the weight-loss clinic at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, told the New York Times.

Bad diets early on predict weight problems in adulthood, since weight is so difficult to lose. And now experts worry about a surge in children diagnosed with obesity-related Type-2 diabetes, once known as "adult onset." The damage from tobacco use can be curtailed with cessation, but Type-2 diabetes is incurable.

With its $29 billion (U.S.) in sales and a stable of powerhouse brands like Oreo, Velveeta, Tang, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Planters peanuts and Ritz crackers — many of them aimed at kids — Kraft is among the likeliest targets for any organized assault on the food industry's marketing tactics.

There is no escaping the legacy of J.L. Kraft, a native of Stevensville, Ont., near Fort Erie, in pondering the fact that, apart from a few denizens of the South Sea Islands, Americans are the fattest people on earth.

James Lewis Kraft, second-oldest of 11 children in a Mennonite farm family, was the Henry Ford of food, a trailblazer in the mass marketing of cheese, caramels, marshmallows and jams and jellies. Not long after launching his business in Chicago in 1903 with a grubstake of $65, J.L. Kraft invented processed cheese — a means of standardizing the quality of cheese and lengthening its shelf life. And early in the 20th century, J.L. was a pioneer in national distribution of branded food products.

It's no exaggeration to say Kraft Foods taught many North Americans how to eat, from the recipes that Ed Herlihy and other hosts dispensed during commercial breaks of Kraft Music Hall, Kraft Television Theatre, Kraft Mystery Theatre and the company's sponsorship of National Hockey League broadcasts and other cultural and sport events.

Kraft's motives in this week's announcement are held to be suspect by some critics.

Strike One against Kraft is its parentage. Majority owner Altria Group Inc., the former Philip Morris Cos., is eager to avoid a repeat of the $246 billion (U.S.) paid by tobacco firms to settle prosecutions by U.S. state governments alleging it withheld from the public what it knew about tobacco-related health risks. Skeptics say Kraft is merely co-opting the language of health activists to escape future liability claims.

That sounds a bit farcical. But early lawsuits against tobacco and asbestos makers failed, too. Over the many years of persistent litigation, evidence that surfaced in the discovery phase of countless trials saw an amassing of memos and other documents that incriminated the accused. Tort lawyers fresh from their victory over Big Tobacco now ask what does Big Food know about the long-term health effects of Doritos and Fruit Loops that they're not telling?

Henry Anhalt, a doctor who runs New York's "Kids Weight Down" program, told Reuters this week that Kraft has simply launched a pre-emptive strike at potential ambulance chasers.

"The soothsayers are saying that coming down the pike are going to be large lawsuits, class-action suits looking at cardiovascular disease, premature death, diabetes, and they're going to turn to the food industry and lay it on their feet," Anhalt said.

Kraft spokesperson Michael Mudd seemed to concede the point, saying this week that if the company's better-eating initiatives "also discourage a plaintiff's attorney or unfair litigation, that's just fine with us."

Strike Two against Kraft's new gambit is that it's conveniently self-serving on the profit front. By selling smaller portions at the same price, and by cutting its in-school marketing budget, the firm stands to boost its margins at a time when its stock has sagged from its 2001 initial offering price.

But there are signs of genuine concern at Kraft's Northfield, Ill., headquarters in suburban Chicago. Like beer marketers pressured in the 1980s to stop associating booze with sex appeal, Kraft has started purging its ads of images of youthful sedentary gluttony. The company that makes the proud claim that people have eaten 450 billion Oreos since the cookie was introduced in 1912 surprised Madison Avenue recently by yanking a TV spot for Double Stuff Oreos that showed a group of teens sitting around lethargically.

While competitors such as Unilever PLC are focused on health-related initiatives like rolling out more nutritious versions of existing products, Kraft has gone further by vowing to scrap some tried-and-true marketing practices. Most notably, it will suspend its in-school promotions, consisting of free samples, posters and gifts and financial incentives to schools whose cafeterias serve Kraft products. School principals with their own budget crises to worry about can henceforth forget about pocketing up to $15,000 (U.S.) from Kraft by fronting a choir that outclasses crosstown rivals in renditions of "Oh I Wish I Were An Oscar Mayer Weiner" and other classics.

"What distinguishes the Kraft announcement is that it says what it won't do," Yale University weight disorders expert Kelly Brownell said this week.

And reducing portion sizes could be a big deal, after all. People tend to eat what's in front of them. In Fat Land: How Americans Became The Fattest People In The World (2003), author Greg Critser traces the over-eating crisis in part to one David Wallerstein, movie-house executive who was frustrated in his attempts in the 1960s to induce patrons to buy multiple servings of popcorn, soft drinks and other high mark-up items.

But Wallerstein, now an executive at McDonald's Corp., ultimately discovered that people who felt guilty about going back for seconds will blithely pay up for larger portions of snacks if they come in one huge serving. For this eureka moment we can blame "super-sizing" or "up-sizing," a phenomenon whose manifestations include the Big Mac, pizza sold by the foot at Little Caesar's, the "never-ending pasta" at Olive Garden, and 7-Eleven's Big Gulp.

Kraft has also begun overhauling its menu, offering its new Fun Fuel as a more nutritious alternative to its flagship Lunchables luncheon-meat line, for instance. A new Kraft advisory council of experts in fitness, youth marketing, public health and human behaviour is charged with devising guidelines for reformulating everything from Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to Chunks Ahoy! biscuits to reduce calories, fat, cholesterol and sugar.

Not lacking for expertise in concocting new comestibles and packaging them to sell, Kraft will make an unconvincing case if it tries to argue it cannot help change eating behaviour. At its food laboratories, responsible for developing the 537 cheese products alone that it markets, Kraft experiments with "flavour profiles," "mouth feel" (food texture) and taste ingredients that succeed in "triggering the drool."

Many of the Kraft technicians might as well be toiling for Lego. From Jell-O X-treme fruit gel caps to braided cheese sticks and cheese strings, a large number of the new products Kraft rolls out each year are designed to be fun for kids to play with.

With an arsenal of $4.5 billion (U.S.) to spend on advertising, the food makers and fast-food chains have ample opportunity to make healthy eating cool with kids. This is a case where the message might be more important than the product. "We already have a lot of healthy foods available," complains Julie Walsh, a dietician at the American Dietetic Association. "But Americans don't buy and eat these."

They need more encouragement, short of the "Twinkie tax" that some U.S. legislators have mused about imposing on junk food.

Certainly there is room for improvement at Kraft.

On Kraft's Web site, check out the recipe for Tropical Ambrosia Salad, a staple of showers and backyard fetes. The site provides no nutritional information or detailed data on health effects of this treat that is made from pineapple chunks, banana slices, orange sections, toasted coconut, sour cream and Kraft Jet-Puffed Miniature Marshmallows.

Worse, Kraft has a suggestion to go with your salad. Apple cubes in place of the orange sections? Why, no. You might want to embellish that salad with All American BBQ Bacon Cheeseburgers. The recipe calls for two tablespoons of Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce, eight Kraft Deli Deluxe Process American Slices, and eight slices of Oscar Mayer Bacon. And did we mention the Toppings Buffet Bar?

Now, if that isn't super-sizing...