Lunchables revolutionized children’s meals when they launched in 1989. The yellow boxes filled with crackers, cheese, and deli meats provided working moms with an easy way to pack lunches, and children with a tangible DIY experience. Sales reached $200 million in the first year alone.
According to a study published in the journal Last Week, its appeal is no coincidence, but rather the result of the ultra-processed food industry’s adoption of tobacco marketing tactics, technology and behavioral science. Special issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
After Philip Morris Companies acquired General Foods in the 1980s, the company “applied its technical knowledge of cigarette manufacturing” to bring Lunchables to market, writes author Laura Schmidt.
her reportThe study, based on previously private company documents, adds to a growing body of research showing how Big Tobacco produced and sold many of the unhealthy and addictive ultra-processed foods that saturate today’s food supply. oreo and kraft mac and cheese.
Subscribe to newsletter
Get global health reports delivered straight to your inbox
In response to the feature, the Consumer Brands Association told The Examiner that packaged food manufacturers comply with government nutrition policies and “deliver safe, affordable and convenient products that consumers rely on every day.”
Kraft Heinz, current owner of Lunchables, said in a statement: The company hasn’t partnered with Philip Morris since 2007 and said it now has a portfolio of “affordable options with more protein, more whole grains, less sugar and sodium, and no artificial colors.” The tobacco company did not respond to requests for comment.
The trial spoke to Professor Schmidt of the University of California, San Francisco, who has spent years researching the connections, about the legacy of Big Tobacco’s ultra-processed foods.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your research is based on documents from the 1980s and 1990s. Kraft said it has been changing ownership and reinventing its products for a long time. Why is this important today?
One of the most important features of Lunchables was the idea of using consumer-driven tobacco-style product development, incorporating consumer research into the actual product engineering.
They knew that mothers felt guilty and worried about the health effects of feeding their children packaged foods. So, I decided to wrap it as a gift. We made a small transparent window so the mothers could see the food. They confirmed that there are many familiar brands of existing Kraft cheese singles.
They also designed the product to look like a toy. Both of these characteristics of the tobacco product development strategy remain central to the brand today. Kraft’s latest marketing is all about showing kids making little animals out of crackers and processed meat.
If the company has changed so much since becoming owned by tobacco companies, why is it still using product design features developed by tobacco companies?
It makes me laugh because when I was a kid, I used to beg my mom to buy me Lunchables.
It’s very intentional. Tobacco companies were troubled by the idea of locking in kids who were loyal to their brands. Why develop cartoon characters like Joe Camel to sell cigarettes when kids can’t even buy cigarettes? This is a very central feature of the tobacco business model, which transitioned into an ultra-processed food business model in the 1980s and ’90s.
If you can lock a consumer into your brand and crowd out your competitors at age 3 or 5, you won’t have to compete as hard for that consumer for the rest of their lives. Companies literally do the math in their marketing departments to amortize how much money they can save by locking you in at a younger age.
We know that ultra-processed foods are: associated with some pretty serious health problemscancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc. However, some may say that eating junk food is a personal choice. How do you respond to that?
It’s a completely personal choice and people should have a choice. The problem is that 70% of processed foods in grocery stores are ultra-processed. There are actually very few options.
Companies intentionally create the illusion of choice to escape responsibility for limiting consumers’ ability to have a wide range of choices based on health. The same goes for healthy or natural claims on the front of the package.
We’re talking about eight multinational food companies that own the world’s food supply. There is a huge lack of competition. So the idea that we have a choice, that there is competition, is false. This is not a free market.
Subscribe to newsletter
Get global health reports delivered straight to your inbox
What role, if any, do you think the government plays?
Antitrust law will be the first stop. Breaking up these monopolies, which own most of the food supply and own the grocery stores, would be a very wise move to lower prices through competition and market mechanisms.
Now consider the basic public health regulations that we know about. This includes taxing unhealthy products. Warning label on front of packagerestricts child-focused marketing and refuses to feature cartoon characters on the front of packaging.
These are all very established and well researched. More than 70 countries around the world tax soda. There are countries across Latin America that put warning labels on ultra-processed foods.
In your paper, you say that the U.S. lawsuit A movement against tobacco companies in the 1990s led to increased regulation and a decline in smoking. But Big Tobacco didn’t go anywhere, and since then a number of new products have hit the market, including e-cigarettes and pouches, which also carry health risks. How do you think the food industry will react to this moment?
Tobacco litigation, in conjunction with regulatory strategies, has dramatically reduced the incidence of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease in the United States. This is a huge public health success, and we should emulate it as a blueprint for our way out of commercially driven epidemics.
How will the industry react? We already know how they are reacting. they are very worried. They use lobbying and campaign finance to take advantage of members of government at the top and make it impossible for members of government at the bottom to protect public health.
Another strategy they like is reformulation. Just when people were starting to worry about childhood obesity, Kraft launched low-fat Lunchables. They worried that they would lose market share as people became more wary of unhealthy foods. They are reformulating to stabilize their market share.
They want us to look at the big picture and focus on what can be done to quickly reformulate these foods, rather than looking at the fact that when they came on the market in the 1980s, it led to an epidemic of childhood obesity and adult diseases in children.
Given this elaborate ecosystem, is there any advice for consumers to be aware of these tactics and make informed decisions, or is it really beyond that?
It’s very difficult because they’re saturating our food supply with this stuff. It’s nearly impossible to eat outside of the ultra-processed food business model.
I encourage people to reorient the package. Ingredient labels are never perfect. However, if you see something you don’t recognize, don’t have in your kitchen, or something that looks a little suspicious, don’t buy the product.
The trouble here is that companies have known for a long time that consumers are concerned about this. So they develop labels that confuse consumers by claiming that something is natural. This makes it even more difficult for us to navigate the food system.
For those with time and money, cooking at home using reliable ingredients is probably the best option. But again, this is what a lot of people want, and we shouldn’t live in a food system where 70% of what’s in the grocery store is questionable.
