The trust is gone.
Label-obsessed consumers are looking at food in a new way, demanding to know what it is, where it comes from and whether anyone, anywhere is hurt as food moves from field to fork.
But the public’s tastes are so trend-driven that food companies are struggling to keep up.
A few short years ago, agave nectar was the darling sweetener of the functional food set, buoyed by early but promising science. Always looking for ways to make food healthier, B.C.’s Left Coast Naturals began to incorporate agave into their Hippie Foods product line.
“When it first came out, Dr. Oz was all over it as the new best thing, a great alternative to sugar, lower on the glycemic index,” said marketing director Johanna Israel-Duprey.
“Agave had a better health halo [than sugar], consumers really believed what they heard and it felt better to them.”
Well, the shine is off agave now.
“The newer studies say agave is just sugar,” said Israel-Duprey. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but customers aren’t as interested in it anymore.”
The company is now looking at coconut sugar as a possible alternative.
Most conventional sugar comes from genetically modified beets, not allowed under the company’s organic and non-GMO certifications.
High-fructose corn syrup, widely used as a sweetener in mainstream processed food, is derived from genetically engineered corn.
“We may not end up reformulating products that have agave, but going forward we aren’t going to be using it in new products,” Israel-Duprey said.
Consumer tastes can be very trendy, so what’s good today might be out of favour next year, said James Donaldson, CEO of the B.C. Food Processors Association.
“The goalposts are always moving and companies that can adapt are going to succeed,” said Donaldson.
To meet the expectations of “deep label readers,” companies such as Left Coast Naturals and others in the health food space are embracing a concept called clean labelling, said Israel-Duprey.
Nearly every large gathering of food processors in the past 12 months has included a component on clean labels and what that means in practice.
Innova Market Insights reported that about 20 per cent of new products enter the market with a clean-label strategy.
“In the past few years, clean labelling has had a big impact on product development,” Donaldson said. “The push for clean labels is driven by consumers, especially millennials who have an increased awareness of what they are putting in their bodies, so you have to be aware of what they are looking for.”
The problem is that the industry has not yet clearly defined what a clean label is.
A new breed of deeply suspicious consumers wants to know everything about what they put into their bodies and they are looking for purity.
For some people, a clean label has fewer ingredients, minimally processed. For others it means plant-based or free of gluten or ingredients that are genetically engineered. Some people are more concerned with fair trade and ethical sourcing and for many it’s all of the above.
The now-popular notion that you shouldn’t eat anything with ingredients that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food has the industry scrambling for options.
But it’s tricky.
Maize, alone, is the source of hundreds of processed oils, starches and proteins widely used to make tens of thousands of processed foods.
Soy is similarly processed into dozens of ingredients with names that are unrecognizable to almost everyone but food scientists.
But food firms of every size are under increasing pressure from social media to clean their labels.
“People don’t want colours with numbers in their food anymore,” said Jim Murphy, the president of General Mills’ cereal division.
The new Trix, for instance, will kill off its fluorescent blue and green puffs, which chemists found hard to colour without artificial dyes.
Cheerios are now made with cane sugar rather than beet sugar, after anti-GMO activists waged a campaign against General Mills online.
The move puts General Mills in the same food-conglomerate camp as Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Kraft, which over the past year have removed mostly harmless additives to make their foods look fresher or more natural.
“Clean is a buzzword that represents consumer perception that foods should be natural, but it’s also about transparency in labelling,” said Andrew Tait, president of Vancouver’s Tait Laboratories. “It’s hard to define exactly what clean ingredients mean — 20 people will give you 20 different answers.”
Consumer demands can take food processors down some strange pathways.
Tait has developed and commercialized the digestive aid MS Plus from mandarin orange peel, which he had tested for gluten to make a gluten-free label claim.
“There is no gluten in orange peels, but when people ask whether something is in there, you need to have an answer,” he said.
Consumers are leery of ingredients they don’t recognize, or that sound too science-y. Some shoppers — spurred on by dubious healthy-living websites — avoid products that contain the preservative ascorbic acid, which is just vitamin C.
“People will look at a label and see lactic acid and mistakenly assume that it comes from dairy,” said Andre Kroecher, co-founder of Vancouver-based Daiya Foods.
Daiya’s line of non-dairy cheeses and snacks are made from carefully sourced ingredients, some of which have science-y sounding names and others that have been vilified by the Google generation, such as carrageenan.
“A lot of people are against carrageenan right now, but it’s just a seaweed-based product,” he said. “We can’t win it all the time, because it’s a trend-based industry. We just try to stay true to our values.”
However, faced with consumer discomfort over palm oil in their block and sliced cheese, Daiya opted to reformulate.
“Even though we were confident our palm oil was traceable and sustainable, there was considerable uproar,” Kroecher said. “We aren’t really hearing about it anymore, but we thought we could make a better product without it, so that’s a win-win.”
WHAT IS A CLEAN LABEL?
There is no clear definition of clean, but a food business might consider some or all of these:
• Fewer ingredients
• Recognizable ingredients
• Minimally processed
• Plain language
• Ethically sourced
• Organic
• Free of allergens
• Free of artificial flavour and colours
• Non-GMO
CLEAN AND NOT-SO-CLEAN LABELS
McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets break clean labelling rules for length, clarity, overprocessing and science-y sounding ingredients: White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavouring [botanical source], safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid), sodium phosphates, natural flavour (botanical source). Breading: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, dextrose, corn starch. Source: mcdonalds.com
Post Shreddies are the original clean-label food, with an ingredients list that is short and simple: Whole grain wheat, sugar, salt, barley malt extract. Source: Postfoods.ca
FIVE SCARY-SOUNDING FOOD ADDITIVES
The scientific-sounding Latin-based names of many common food additives tend to obscure their benign nature
• Tocopherol is just a fancy name for a potent antioxidant. In food processing, tocopherol is used to extend the shelf life of baked goods and cereals.
• Xanthan gum is a thickening agent used in salad dressings and sauces, and it is derived from bacteria. Not convinced? It’s also allowed in certified organic foods.
• Ascorbic acid is a useful food preservative that occurs naturally in many fruits and vegetables. You might know it better as vitamin C.
• Sodium benzoate slows the growth of moulds and bacteria and is widely used in packaged cake mix and dairy-based foods. You will also find it in cranberries, plums and apples.
• Carrageenan has been the subject of online scaremongering, but this vegan-friendly thickener is a derivative of Irish moss. It is used in ice cream and organic plant-based proteins.
