Confessions of a Processed Food Marketer: Taking Out the Good Stuff

Ever wonder why the peanut butter you’ve been eating since you were a kid tastes different than it used to? Or why the chocolate cookies you love suddenly taste more like sugar than chocolate? And is it your imagination, or are there less blueberries in your favourite granola than there used to be?

This is one of the biggest secrets of the food industry today - margin enhancement. Margin enhancement is a fancy word for making a product more cheaply, often by taking out real ingredients and replacing them with cheaper synthetic ones.

Why is this done? Well, as I’ve said before, food companies, like all other companies, have to make profits. And not just any profits, but profits that continue to grow year by year. This is notoriously difficult in a slow-growing grocery industry.

So how to do companies do this? Well, to put it simply, there are two ways: by making new products or by squeezing more money out of existing ones. The latter is called margin enhancement.

Say a company makes yogurt.  They might decide to replace some of the real fruit in that yogurt with artificial fruit flavour - just enough so that consumers won’t notice (they do consumer testing to ensure this.) Though this might mean just a few cents savings per package, over millions of packages, those savings can really add up.

Once marketers discovered this trick, it became a key strategy in meeting their profit targets every year.  In fact, many companies have a specific cost-saving goal they have to reach, which basically means that they are committing to degrade their products year after year.

This is why the products that you grew up with just don’t taste the same as they used to. The cookies you loved when you were a kid may have had sugar, butter, flour, chocolate and vanilla in them. But over the years, through ‘margin enhancement’, they have likely changed to high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, chocolate flavouring and vanillin (synthetic vanilla). While each of these iterations probably did taste similar to the previous version, when you add them all up, they taste vastly different from the cookies you ate as a kid.

This happens all the time: cheese is taken out of cheese sauce, spices in seasonings are replaced with starchy filler, chocolate is replaced with sugar and cocoa butter. In fact, the targets are so relentless that marketers sometimes launch products already knowing what high-cost ingredients they will remove in Year Two (hence, fewer blueberries in that fantastic granola you just discovered last year.)

To be fair, the process of margin enhancement is not always profit-driven, though that is often the case. Sometimes it is due to other circumstances - if the price of sugar goes up, for example, a company may decide to replace it with a cheaper alternative rather than raise the price of their cookie. Or if there is a shortage of strawberries, it may have to substitute another berry in its fruit punch. Sometimes, companies will realize they have gone too far and actually work to put the good stuff back in their food.

But most of the time, the products on your grocery store shelf have been downgraded and continue to deteriorate as the years go by. This is why we don’t pay the true cost of food; it’s because we are paying for slightly varying combinations of fake ingredients instead of real food.

This is why I am so adamant about reading the ingredient label: with products constantly changing, it's the only way you can know what’s really in the product. The grocery store is your battlefield, and you have to go in their armed with knowledge. See my tips for tackling the grocery store here and here.

photo credit: Christi @ Love From The Oven via photo pin cc