Kids help grocers kick their sugar habit

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Published May 25, 2017

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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?”

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