#265: Marion Nestle on Food Politics and the Cereal Aisle

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1:16The cereal companies are trying to sell cereal, and the big question to ask about them is, how did they get people to think that a sugary breakfast cereal, an appropriate thing for kids to be eating in the morning? How did that happen? The cereal companies are very good at marketing and their goal is to sell this stuff and they're very good at it. And so the book is about how they do that. I would say that I would give this advice to any company. If you want to be trusted, Don't push the envelope on health claims. Don't push ridiculous things that aren't going to make any difference. There's this curious need to educate the public about what's really healthy and to get the food companies to produce foods that are healthier.

2:11Welcome everyone to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm really excited about today's guest because I've been asking her for about a year to come on the podcast and we finally got her. It's Marion Nessel. She is one of the most influential voices in nutrition, food policy, and public health. She's Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and helped pioneer the field of food studies as an academic discipline. Before joining NYU, she served as Senior Nutrition Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped oversee the landmark 1988 Surgeon General's report on nutrition and health.

2:46She is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Food Politics, what to eat, soda politics, and unsavory truth. For more than four decades, Marianne has studied how the big food companies influence what we eat through marketing, nutrition research, labeling, and public policy, and her work has helped shape the national conversation around food, health, and consumer choice. She's also become one of the most widely recognized experts on the intersection of nutrition science and the food industry. Her newest book, Sugar Coated, Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food, uses cereal boxes as a lens to explore the history of food marketing, health claims, and consumer behavior in America.

3:25I think it's really helpful for aspiring CPG entrepreneurs to understand her work and her perspectives, and I think you'll also just find it's really fun to get to know her throughout this podcast. All right, here we go.

3:40Marion, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. I wonder if you could just start us out with a quick intro. Sure. I'm Marian Nessel. I'm professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. I'm emerita. I retired in 2017, but I'm still hanging around. All right. And I've heard your name so many times in and around the industry as one of the best known people in and around food policy and nutrition. I'm so excited to have you here. And I also feel really privileged that I got to check out an advanced copy of your new book, Sugar Coated, and it's all around the cereal industry.

4:19So I wondered, what made you want to write a whole book about the cereal industry? Well, that's an easy question to answer because I've collected cereal boxes for years. I started collecting them when I was the editor of the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health that came out in 1988. And the following year, General Mills produced a cereal that had the Surgeon General's recommendations on the package. And I bought the box and cut out the front panel. And then later, I started noticing cereal boxes with what I thought were absolutely ridiculous health claims on them. And I started buying cereal boxes with absurd health claims, with things that seemed really funny, with things about federal regulations.

5:11It was kind of a selective and random collection. I wasn't trying very hard. But when my book What to Eat was in progress, and it's a very big book, and it sat with an editor for four months while I was waiting and waiting and waiting for that editor to get going on it. And my agent said, what are you going to do next? And I said, I would love to do something with the cereal boxes. And he said, what cereal boxes? And by that time, I had about 150, which turns out to be nothing in the world of cereal box collectors. It turns out lots of people collect cereal boxes. So he was quite puzzled by that.

5:58And I said, well, why don't you let me write a proposal for it? And I remembered when I started on the proposal that 15 years earlier, I had been visiting Kellogg in Battle Creek. And because they had agreed to let me go through the files and look at old cereal boxes, because I couldn't remember how the nutrition facts panel had changed. And when I got there, they said, do you want the good news or the bad news? And the bad news was that they weren't going to let me anywhere near the files. The good news was that they gave me color facsimiles of three different cereals from the year they had been introduced until 2010, which is when I was visiting there, which means that I have an entire collection of facsimiles of all brand cereal from 1919, for Rice Krispies from 1928, and for Fruit Loops from 1963.

7:01Cereal companies change the boxes certainly every year, but often multiple times a year. And so I had this complete collection. If you want to know how much sugar a cereal had in 1974, I can look it up and show you. So we were talking then about, you know, that there was obviously a book in this. Just leafing through these things, the nutritionists there would say, oh, this is when the FDA did this. And this is when this rule came in. And this was when General Mills tried to do this. And this is when we were sued. And so forth and so on. And we knew there was a book in it. But we dropped it. But that was when I really got to know Lisa Sutherland, who was a vice president for Kellogg at the time.

7:51And some years later, I met her again. And we talked about the possibility of a book and we went so far as to exploring the copyright issues. Could we reproduce pictures of cereal boxes legally for academic purposes? But then I lost touch with her. And so when I was writing the proposal, I thought maybe I should check with her because she and I had talked about doing a book. And I tracked her down. She's now the president of Jacksonville University in Florida. And she said, I'm doing this book with you. And that's what we did. I love it. And we had the best time. This was a terrific writing partnership.

8:35We were really equal partners in it. And she knew a lot of stuff that I didn't. I knew stuff that she didn't. It was very complimentary. Well, you seem like someone who would be a lot of fun to do a book with. And like you also have this incredible archive of all of these cereal boxes. So you were talking about in 1988 seeing a surgeon general's recommendation on a mass cereal box, which probably a lot of people at the time wouldn't have batted an eye at. But you really took notice of that. Like, this is ridiculous. I was thrilled. I had spent two years of my life on that report. That's amazing.

9:12And here it was on a cereal box. I just wish I'd kept the whole thing. I don't keep the cereal in case anybody wonders. I just flatten the box and they don't take up very much room. And then the other thing that happened was I asked the NYU archivist if they had any materials on cereal. And she said, oh, do you mean our cereal box collection? I said, what cereal box collection? And they had 300 cereal boxes that had been given to them by some donor who mostly collected sports figures. This is amazing. Wow, what a good coincidence. And then since then, we've learned about so many other people who have collected them.

9:56I think it's an impossible thing to collect because there's too many of them. So I wanted to ask you, that moment when you looked in 1988 and saw like, wow, this is ridiculous, the Surgeon General's recommendation on this kind of product, you would like to think like, oh, no, without it's like something that would only happen way back in the past. But do you feel like that's actually still true today? And you look and you see some of the recommendations. You're like, this is bonkers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the cereal companies are trying to sell cereal. And the big question to ask about them is how did they get people to think that a sugary breakfast cereal is an appropriate thing for kids to be eating in the morning?

10:38How did that happen? And it turns out there's a really long story about it. But the cereal companies are very good at marketing and their goal is to sell this stuff and they're very good at it. And so the book is about how they do that. So I've read through the book and tell me if this is a fair overgeneralization about what happened is that people did really used to rely much more on grains in general in the American diet. And there was a lot of positive association around whole grains. And so people accepted that coming into the breakfast world. And then some of the manufacturers started adding a lot more sugar to make it much more palatable because whole grains can be tough to actually get into a format that is even like chewable, but also that tastes good for people to have for breakfast.

11:26And then there were some people who added a lot of sugar, some people who tried to not add too much sugar. And then you just kind of had the people went a little nuts on trying to make things that kids then would actually just love, which probably meant just dumping tons of sugar. And at the same time, I think still touting health benefits. I mean, some around the whole grains, but some around lots of other claims that they wanted people to think because they had already successfully conveyed the importance of breakfast in overall nutrition. Like breakfast is really important. Breakfast is the most important meal a day.

11:56So we need to have foods for breakfast that seem healthy. So, hey, here are some claims that we technically qualify for, even though there's also a lot of sugar in this kind of stuff. Is that like a fair summation of some of this? It is. And this is some of the really amazing parts about this. I mean, these things started out as health foods in the late 1800s with Kellogg, who was a health nut. He was a physician. We would consider him a health nut now. He believed that whole grains were the solution to all health problems. And he followed Seventh-day Adventist principles when it came to diet and health.

12:34But he also had other very amusing ideas about it. he thought that cereals would end sexual promiscuity and would stop people from masturbating. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And he was the one who kept the cereals from having a lot of sugar. His successors couldn't put a lot of sugar into cereals until after he was dead. And so the really heavily sugared cereals didn't really become popular until the 1960s. Fruit Loop started out with a lot of sugar and still has it. There are cereals that have half the calories or half the weight from sugar. And so when you look at the things that make whole grains healthy, which are the bran layers and the vitamins and minerals that they contain and the fiber that they contain, there are a lot of breakfast cereals aimed at kids that hardly have any fiber at all.

13:33So what do you think has actually changed and what hasn't changed? Let's say in the last 20, 30, 40 years, you also talk about the importance of nostalgia, right? And it's so true. Everyone that I know who grew up, I was born in 82. So, you know, really had a lot of my formative years, late 80s, early 90s. I can tell you 10 cereals that I loved when I was a kid that were just only sugar, pretty much. Probably sugar was number one or number two ingredient in all of them. If it's number two, it's because it's splitting the kinds of sugar that it has there. So it doesn't have to list it as first.

14:06Yep. That's how I got my parents to buy it. Thank you. So what has changed and what hasn't? Obviously, there's a lot more awareness around sugar these days. But if I go look at the cereal aisle, I mean, I think cereal sales are probably just down a little bit in general from the height of when we all used to eat them. Oh, they're way down. Yeah. They're way down. The cereal industry's in trouble now. But in terms of the offerings, what do you think has changed in the last couple of decades and what hasn't? Well, they're not nearly as much fun for me as they used to be because the ridiculous health claims are gone.

14:37The FDA cracked down on them and companies can't claim that cereals are going to prevent colds or prevent cognitive dissonance or any of the other things that they used to do. And people aren't eating breakfast anymore in the same way. It turns out that taking cereal out of a box, putting it into a bowl, adding milk and having a bowl to clean up afterwards is more than a lot of people want to deal with. It's amazing what you say. So I'm holding in front of me a special K box. Yes. Which if you turn it around and look at the nutritional label, OK, it says the added sugars I think you would call kind of modest.

15:17OK, so it has four grams of added sugars. Ooh, low by cereal standard. Yeah. And you know, it tastes that way too. It doesn't taste like the crack of some of the other options out there. It is kind of wild. So on the front here, it says 13 grams of protein. And then below it, in much smaller font, 6 grams from milk. 7 grams from cereal. It's like, wait a minute, what? I mean, like, well, what kind of milk am I putting in it? And also, like, I don't know, am I using one of those milks that has a lot of sugar in it? Or I don't know. Right. Right. It's kind of wild, isn't it? Well, protein is the big thing these days.

15:54So all of the cereals are trying to promote having protein in them because that's the big hot nutrient these days. So would you say that cereal is kind of a window into what's happening overall in food culture? It's almost like, yeah, that's why we wrote the book. You know what I mean? It could be like a blank canvas for whatever trend is happening. Yeah, that's why we wrote the book. Right. So does that mean that they're all adding fiber claims in the next couple of years because that's ellipsing protein? Fiber maxing is a big trend right now. So they will do anything to reflect trends. There are two things about cereal boxes that make them a particularly terrific product to study.

16:34First of all, they have a big box. They take up a lot of room on shelves and that box is a billboard. You can get a lot of information on that box. And the other thing is that they change the package designs, often multiple times a year, sometimes once a month. I mean, there's some serials that do that. So they can quickly respond to changes in rules. One of the things that I'm looking at right now is what are they doing about artificial color additives? Because the government has said that it wants companies to remove the artificial additives. And so far, I've only seen one cereal, General Mills Trix, that has actually done that.

17:19And Trix is still being sold with the artificial additives, but there's now a version that has vegetable dyes, not the petroleum dyes. So that's a quick response to a federal request that companies remove these dyes. It's voluntary. They don't have to do it, but they are. And so you see a very rapid response to whatever's going on. You see them producing special boxes for holidays, special boxes for special occasions, special boxes for individual celebrities. I did enjoy in your book, you call out one collectible, which is a Stan Musial, who's a Cardinals legend, box of Wheaties. I think that goes for about 5 ,000 bucks, which is if I had an extra 5k sitting around, I might buy for my dad who is a Cardinals fan growing up.

18:15That would be pretty cool. So you like this because it's like fun and nostalgic, but it just is such a good illustration of marketing because of how big the box is and how ridiculous some of the stuff is. I know you also call out like how big is a serving size? I don't know. I'm holding a couple boxes here. One of them says one and a quarter cups. The other says one. I know there are others that when they needed to get the absolute calorie count down, just drop down to three quarters of a cup as the suggested serving size. Like it's the Wild West a little bit, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And it's very simple, actually.

18:47The companies are just trying to sell product and they'll do whatever they can. That's legal to get you to buy the product. Every now and then they cross a line and then the FDA gets upset and then they have to back off on it. But again, because they can change the boxes so often, they can be very responsive to whatever's going on. Marion, do you have friends who work at some of these big CBG companies? Have you, like, known people well who work at them? No. I mean, Lisa Sutherland, my co-author, is kind of the only one. I have known others, and I've certainly been at meetings with food company executives.

19:23The reason that I ask is because I actually worked at Mars Chocolate for three years, which I honestly really enjoyed my time there. That was my introduction into the CPG world. And from that time, I learned that I loved CPG and I didn't necessarily care as much about the specific products that they were making. Because I think when we talk about the big CPGs and like some of these health things, I think we're like, yeah, they just want to sell more. but it's interesting to me to think about like the actual people behind these products and the marketers who I know and like they really are in my opinion good people who work there and have long careers there and want to do good at their jobs I don't know that they think about it so deeply in that way of like really what are these products that we're selling and the place that they have and I think there are a lot of ways that you can justify it to yourself of like these are really affordable products and we need to have affordable products out there for people.

20:18We can't all eat the organic pasture raised massaged and eggs for breakfast every morning, stuff like that. So that's kind of why I mentioned it. I'm just like, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's hard to really like know exactly their motivations other than probably everybody working there is trying to do a good job at their job. Absolutely. They're just doing their job. And before there was childhood obesity, their doing their job was never an issue. Once childhood obesity started, and that only happened beginning in the 1980s, I mean, once it became a really serious problem. I was part of that.

20:53Then things changed and they were caught by surprise. I've certainly been at plenty of meetings with food industry executives. I would agree with you completely. They're really nice people and they really think they're doing good work. But I heard a food industry executive say at a meeting at the White House, actually, during the Obama administration, I wish we could stop marketing to children. I know it's wrong. I wish we could stop, but our stockholders won't let us. And I was just floored by that, not at the sentiment, but I'd never heard it stated so baldly and openly. and he was just stating the reality of his particular job.

21:38His job was to get people to buy more food regardless of the consequences on their health. I wonder what the interaction is of that kind of stuff with social media now because social media has become such an important discovery tool for so many products. But honestly, I don't know how this works, but I have to assume that it's harder for them to then market to children who by and large are not on those platforms or probably can't be served ads in the same way? Not at all. They pay influencers. Oh, it's the influencers that they know a lot of kids are following. They hire influencers to do the marketing.

22:13They pay them, and sometimes the influencers disclose that they're being paid, and sometimes they don't. No, I mean, marketing has moved online where it's very, very difficult to monitor. Yeah. And very few people are monitoring it because it's very difficult to do. and it's enormously effective. It's a big shift because, I mean, yeah, like the big TV ads that probably aired during our Saturday morning cartoons, but also just the shelf placement, right? Like you always hear about this, that they would strategically place really sugary cereals very low to the ground at the grocery stores because that's eye level for some little tykes like me, like, oh yeah, I'm going to get those Froot Loops, all the sugar, let's go.

22:53And they have cartoons and licensed characters on the front and often that are in kids' movies that kind of thing. And those are very appealing to kids so that taking a small child to a supermarket is very difficult to do. It's tantrum inducing if you say no to what a kid wants. But the whole shelf space thing is really interesting because companies pay supermarkets in order to have their products displayed in places where they will be most seen. And this explains what's happened to Cheerios. Boring old original Cheerios used to be the cereal that everybody fed their kid because it was low in sugar.

23:37It is still low in sugar. And the original is still low in sugar. And it was easy for kids. Kids didn't choke on it, which was very important. Now there are 20 different kinds of Cheerios, many of them sugar-sweetened, many of them with chocolate, with marshmallows, with candy, with whatever, because Cheerios can then take up more shelf space and be more visible. I mean, there are rules about supermarkets. The more shelf space, the more people buy. The easier products are to see, the more people buy. The longer they're in the supermarket, the more they buy, and so forth and so on. but the cereal aisle is incredible.

24:21I love it. I mean, I just have such a good time going to supermarkets and seeing what's there. I think that is the thing that actually even drew me into this industry. I was in management consulting, doing back office cost reduction for a bunch of boring stuff. I was like, what's the opposite of this? Oh, those kind of products that are fun and so easy to relate to. And so I think it is those big mass market brands that I was thinking of when I got into this industry. But then I think as the industry was evolving, So was how I was thinking about that and what was right for me personally and just what I felt good about putting out there into the world as well, which led me into more of the natural products industry.

24:57But speaking of that evolution, then like fast forward to today, are there brands out there that you feel like are doing a good job of balancing convenience with also health? Like, I've heard people talk about this, especially who are really deep on nutrition, who are like, yeah, obviously in a perfect world, everyone would be eating these like perfect whole foods and taking time to prepare them and cook them in a very clean way. But like, it doesn't happen this way. So like, there are some brands that do a good job of finding that balance. Well, they try. They try. And what I would call the health food brands, which are using clean ingredients and not adding sugar.

25:39Some of them are better than others. You have to read the ingredient lists very, very carefully to make sure they're not putting in allulose or artificial sweeteners of one kind or another. and they also cost a lot more. I mean, really a lot more. And people are buying them because they think they're healthier for their kids. The cereal that I eat is a very, very boring. I'm post-mini-wheats. It's a one-ingredient cereal. It's got whole wheat and a preservative and that's it. I add my own sugar and I add fruit. That's how I like to eat it. I think it's fine. It's got a lot of fiber. and it seems to me to do what cereals are supposed to be doing.

26:22I like the texture. I don't know. Anyway, that's the one I eat. But these other things, I'm just shocked by the ingredient list. And if it's got more than one or two ingredients, it's ultra-processed. And I mean, there's a lot of evidence that ultra-processed foods aren't good for you. Yep. Speaking of ultra-processed foods, there's a lot of awareness these days and a lot of movement around food policy from the government as well to try to affect change across the country in specific states. Things are happening as well. How do you view a lot of the changes that people are pushing for now that people are becoming much more aware of specific ingredients and colors and flavors, all that kind of stuff?

27:04And how do you think it'll affect cereal also? Well, it affects cereal because the rule is or the message is eat real food and avoid ultra-processed foods. And those two messages exclude most cereals that are in supermarket aisles. I mean, really exclude them. If they've got an artificial sweetener, they're ultra-processed. If they've got a whole lot of texturizers and colors, and even if they have vegetable colors, they're still ultra-processed. So they're going to affect cereals a lot. But the biggest trend affecting cereals is that people aren't eating cereal for breakfast as much anymore. They want things on the go.