Thursday, October 29, 2009
Cooking the Books An Insider Looks at the Food Industry with "Stuffed"
Posted by Nicki Wood on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 8:58 AM
If you haven't read enough about Big Food, get another angle on the issue with Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's Really Making America Fat. It's also good if your blood pressure has dropped dangerously low and you need a dose of righteous anger.
Author Hank Cardello is a veteran of the food business, having worked on Count Chocula and other big name products for General Mills and Coca-Cola. He reports from behind the office door on how marketers, merchandisers and buyers work toward selling more food.
Strategies you'll be familiar with include making food more delicious (like frying French fries in beef tallow), making food seem like a bargain (the "combo meal" strategy) and putting the most-tempting and most-expensive products at eye-level in grocery stores.
Much of the book's path has been trod before, including a chapter on the pestilence of vending machines in school, but Cardello has other insights. Chair of the annual Global Obesity Business Forum, he offers perspectives on why "healthy" takeout food has failed, and why yet one more education effort won't work. The answer, he thinks, is for fast food and fast casual dining places to work with customers, not to eliminate bad foods, but to make favorites more healthy, a process he calls "taking the calories off the street."
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