Coke's renewed effort to plant itself constructively into the obesity debate should sound a warning bell to food and drinks brands of all persuasions – sooner or later, sugar and fat is going to get you.
And if the industry doesn’t get serious about transparency on other fronts such as country of origin labelling, food additives, artificial ingredients and beyond, they too will come home to bite – eventually.
The Coca-Cola Company this week announced in the US its new ‘Coming Together’ program to tackle obesity, including guidelines on advertising to children. It will not advertise to kids under 12 years old nor will it place ads in media where more than 35% of the audience is under 12.
But it goes much broader. Coke launched a one-minute video positioning itself as a pro-active partner to tackle obesity, saying: “As the nation’s leading beverage company we can play an important role.” It included providing more options, giving people easy ways to make informed choices and offering portion control versions of Coke’s most popular drinks.
Further into the spot the voiceover says: “If you eat and drink more calories than you burn-off, you gain weight. That goes for Coca-Cola and everything else with calories.”
But obesity is just the start for food and beverage brands. Australian supermarkets, who are increasingly powerful as private label owners, will need to do more than they ever have to show leadership and corporate responsibility.
Complex food labelling laws, historically the by-product of aggressive government lobbying from large local and multinational food industry players, will be a contentious area for the grocery chains but they too will also go the way of sugar and fat – eventually big brands and retailers will have to come clean.
Celebrity chef and food producer Maggie Beer made it abundantly clear how confusing food labelling laws were for consumers in figuring out foods which were Australian-grown in a speech to the International Year of Co-operatives conference in Port Macquarie last October.
“We were bottling some of our olives. The salt came from South Australia and we had some of our own red wine vinegar in the jar and we were labelling it and then we found out we could not say ‘Produce of Australia’ because the jar came from overseas,” she said.
“It’s interesting – Australians say they will support Australian-made and Australian-grown, but will we? We support what’s marketed most, and we so often support what’s cheapest, especially with food.”
Based in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, where a consumer co-operative was formed in 1944, Beer has a farm which has vineyards, olive groves, quince orchards and a soft fruit orchard. “I know we live in a global market, but our local farmers cannot compete against the imports of a global market when it comes to the cost of our labour.”
That broader debate is still yet to hit its crescendo in Australia but in an interview with AdNews on the obesity epidemic during his recent visit to Australia, Coca-Cola’s global vice-president for advertising strategy and creative excellence, Jonathan Mildenhall, said Coke wanted to contribute to the obesity solution and “keeping quiet” was not going to fix it.
“In a world of transparency, having a public conversation on obesity, opening it up to all sorts of stakeholders so we can better understand some of the actions and initiatives that we can do in local communities that can really help change the tide of obesity – we are not going to do that by keeping quiet. We need to engage in a proper way, not just in a press statement,” he said.
On the contentious subject of how Coca-Cola reconciles lowering calorie counts with getting people to drink more Coke, Mildenhall said: “Our ambition is to grow servings across the entire portfolio and for people to understand that Coca-Cola is right for certain occasions and perhaps not right for all occasions.
“We are a multi-beverage company. If I can get more people drinking Coke that is not a bad thing, but I want more people drinking Coke in the right way. And [I want] more people being aware of the choices they have in the beverage category across our portfolio.”
This article first appeared in the 17 May 2013 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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