Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [76]
Since launching just one new item nationwide can cost as much as $20 million, only the corporate giants can afford to play this game.14
Because of the huge expense of advertising, Zwerdling concludes, the advertising strategy and the takeover strategy are closely tied: “Food corporations merge in part to amass the financial power they need to launch massive advertising campaigns.”15 Other studies confirm that the more any industry relies on advertising, the faster the concentration of market power.16
More eye-catching packaging was also part of your strategy. What has this done for us? Well, by 1980 the cost of the package exceeded the cost of the food ingredients for a fourth of the food and beverage product industry. (Soft drink containers cost two times as much as their contents; beer containers five times as much!) Over the last decade packaging costs have gone up 50 percent faster than the labor costs in our food. Today one out of every 11 dollars we spend on food and drink goes to pay for packaging.17
And the impact of your new product strategy? “In the beginning, there was just Campbell’s chicken rice soup,” quips journalist A. Kent MacDougall. “Today, besides chicken with rice soup, Campbell Soup makes chicken gumbo, chicken noodle, chicken noodle-Os, curly noodles with chicken, cream of chicken, creamy mushroom”18 plus five others. That’s what economists call “product proliferation.” (“To grow dramatically you have to introduce new products,” says General Foods’ Peter Rosow, general manager of the company’s dessert division.) It’s the battle of the giants for supermarket shelf space. And it works. Today, just five companies use 108 brands of cereal to control over 90 percent of cereal sales.
Such product proliferation requires more and more shelf space. Just since the early 1970s, shelf space devoted to candy and chewing gum has gone up 75 percent; that for dog and cat food, 80 percent.19 All this means bigger stores, more clerks—costs which must mean rising prices.
Source: Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1980.
Figure 8. The Price of a Brand Name
And product proliferation, almost by definition, means more processed foods. You can’t easily proliferate new fruits. If you want endless varieties of colors, flavors, and shapes, the answer is more and more processing and ever greater use of food colorings and flavorings. Firms like International Flavors and Fragrances are delighted by your product proliferation strategy. They introduce more than 5,000 scents and 2,000 flavors each year, and estimate that three-quarters of what we buy at the supermarket contains either artificial flavors or scents.20
The energy cost of all this processing is staggering. We use twice as much energy to process our food as to produce all of our nation’s crops, according to the Department of Agriculture.21 And the energy our food system uses off the farm is rising much faster than that used on the farm. The energy consumed in food processing and transportation doubled between 1960 and 1973.22
Food processing generates yet another cost that few of us ever think about—water pollution. Food processing corporations in the United States contribute more waste to water pollution than does our entire human population.23
Not only do we pay for this processing, for burgeoning advertising, for bigger stores and the labor to stock them, but we also pay for the “research and development” of these “new” foods. In 1981 just one company—General Foods—budgeted almost $100 million for developing “new” foods. Food corporations tell us that they are responding to our needs, yet rarely do we get a glimpse of how new products really come to be. This description from Foremost-McKesson is a candid exception.
According to a company spokesperson, the first step is a brainstorming session that produces all kinds of crazy ideas. Typically, only 50 out of 200 ideas are chosen for a preliminary technical analysis. These 50 are presented to “focus groups” of sophisticated consumers (formerly called housewives), and their reactions