London - Before cutting the sugar in its children’s yogurt, Dutch
grocer Albert Heijn conducted a taste test modeled on a classic US TV ad in
which two young boys get their little brother to sample a new cereal.
The supermarket chain invited kids ages 6 to 12 for blind
taste tests of its existing yogurt and the proposed reformulation. Like the
commercial’s little Mikey, who stuns his siblings by devouring the supposedly
healthy Life cereal, a majority of the Dutch children preferred the new
version.
European supermarkets are on the front lines of a push to
reduce the amount of sugar in food and drinks, with consumer groups pushing for
healthier fare and governments in the UK, France, Spain and other countries
imposing taxes on fizzy beverages or sweets. Food companies are trying to
pinpoint just how much sugar they can cut before shoppers reject their
products.
“If you tell consumers a product has less sugar, they will
often stop buying because they think it will taste worse,” said Kate Ewart,
product development director at Tesco, the largest UK retailer.
Read also: Parents: control what your kids eat
Swiss food giant Nestle has turned to technology that alters
sugar’s structure to make it sweeter in smaller amounts, Coca-Cola. and PepsiCo.
are cutting sugar in dozens of drinks and Unilever has reduced the size of
Magnum ice cream bars. Anti-sugar measures are a particular challenge to
European grocers, with lesser resources to devote to research and development
and direct exposure to the new regulations in their main markets.
The supermarkets are testing their own-label groceries,
which have grown to nearly half of the 105 billion-pound [$136 billion]
industry’s sales in the UK, according to industry researcher Kantar Worldpanel.
These ranges provide higher profit margins because they’re made by smaller
outside contractors than the global food giants, giving retailers more
bargaining power.
To avoid alienating buyers of its private labels, which include
Taste the Difference, UK supermarket operator J Sainsbury is trying to remove
sugar “by stealth,” company nutritionist Julie Dean said. The company has cut
sugar by an average of 13 percent across 80 of its breakfast cereal lines, and
by 70 percent and 30 percent, respectively, in its own-brand lemonade and cola.
The London-based retailer initially takes out as much sugar
as is feasible without significantly impairing flavour, then experiments with
different cocktails of sweeteners. Even then, there can be glitches when the
revised version hits the shelves.
“There’s always a bit of a wobble at the start because
people are very, very sensitive, especially if they are long-term consumers of
that product,” Dean said. “But it usually peters out and returns to the normal
level.”
Rival Tesco has cut sugar in a range of products, including
an 18 percent reduction in its cooking sauces and a 9.5 percent reduction
across breakfast cereals. The grocer has found it must be careful in
communicating the changes to shoppers, so as not to be seen as denying them an
indulgence. “We have to slowly re-educate consumers’ taste buds,” Ewart said.
“It’s a constant challenge and we have to keep chipping away at it.”
The moves to cut down on product sweetness are having an
effect, with Group Sopex and Green Pool Commodity Specialists seeing growth in
sugar consumption in 2017-18 falling below the average 2 percent a year of the
past decade or so. The US Department of Agriculture sees the first drop in
demand in a quarter century.
At Albert Heijn, owned by Royal Ahold Delhaize NV, the
yogurt tasters were part of the company’s “kids’ council,” established to
ensure that its reformulated, healthier range doesn’t miss the mark with a
notoriously fickle consumer group.
The company gathered 25 of them at an office in Amstelveen,
a city south of Amsterdam, last year for the test. The children were
interviewed one-by-one in a separate room to prevent peer pressure from swaying
the results. Participants were asked to rank the flavour, colour and texture of
the reformulated yogurts on a scale of 1 to 10. Finally, the researcher asked
for a thumbs-up or -down.
“It was like a focus group but with kids,” said Megan
Hellstedt, vice president for sustainable retailing at Ahold Delhaize. “The
main challenge for us is, will people still like it?”
BLOOMBERG