The Food Scout

The 100-calorie, portion-controlled snack bag was a little experiment from Nabisco launched a couple of years ago (note that Nabisco had the first widely popular fat-free cookie in the mid-nineties), and it appears to have given permission to CPG manufacturers and restaurant chains alike to shrink portions back down to normal sizes. Already, Kraft claims to have sold $160 million worth of 100-calorie packs in 2006.

“Wheat gluten” may someday be the infamous food ingredient the industry uses to refer to the tipping point that led to a large-scale reexamination and overhaul of the way in which we source, process and label our food products. But while the governments of the U.S. and China search for the manufacturing plant hiding the smoking gun on the melamine-tainted wheat gluten issue, the industry is not waiting for a top-down change. Already (and prior to the pet food recall), we are seeing a swelling trend ON THE MAINSTREAM LEVEL of companies making moves to add accountability and assurance to the food supply chain.

In case you’re one of the few remaining Americans who has selectively avoided the “Star Wars” phenomenon for 30 years, you know that “The Clone Wars” is the 2nd (or 5th, technically) installment of the movie serial involving thousands of soldiers cloned from a single person’s DNA engaged in a long, drawn-out war against first, the Trade Federation, and then the Jedi. But enough about my science fiction interests.

We’re a solid 15 or 20 years into the BFY product “trend,” and it appears manufacturers have a short memory when it comes to the roadblocks, failed attempts, casualties and other frustrations that have dogged the industry over that time.

Welcome to the New Age of snack fortification. Ten or fifteen years ago, the FDA would have undoubted slapped the wrists of any major cookie, candy, carbonated beverage and salty-snack CPG companies that tried to fortify their products with vitamins or other healthful properties without significantly improving salt, fat, or sugar content. The concern would have been that people might be “fooled” into thinking these were healthful products and thus consume more of them.