By Fresh Produce Marketing founder Lisa Cork

A few months back, I wrote about diet confusion and the abundance of conflicting information related to eating healthy. Carrying on from this, I was on a flight recently and showing was the much touted, “That Sugar Film.” Well of course I was intrigued. Have any of you seen this movie yet?

The basic premise is the movie’s hero, Australian actor Damon Gameau, goes on a 60-day journey where he eats ‘supposedly healthy’ foods to equal 40 teaspoons of sugar per day from 'hidden' sugars in processed foods. So he doesn’t eat sweets, or chocolates or lollies – no overt sugar – just more hidden sugar. Like Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me, Gameau documents the impact of such foods on his health and state of mind. It makes for interesting viewing.

If like me, you are health conscious but don’t necessarily have a degree in nutrition, it is interesting to see just how much sugar is prevalent in the average healthy Western diet.

His morning breakfast routine includes cereal, a flavoured yoghurt and a glass of commercially processed juice. Total teaspoons of sugar count – approximately 20 – or half of his targeted 40 teaspoons a day.

The scary thing is as a mum, I would have been guilty of feeding my son a similar breakfast over the years. These days, we don’t do cereal anymore, but when he was smaller, I was certainly under the belief that a healthy, high grain cereal (and he never was served anything like Cocoa Pops) with a pot of yoghurt for calcium was an excellent start to the day. Am I thinking differently now.

When you see Damon stack up the equivalent number of sugar cubes in the cereal and then in the yoghurt and then in the juice, it is enough to make any person...and parent cringe. And to think we send our kids to school with a tummy full of sugar and expect them to sit still and learn. It is eye-opening stuff.

Isn’t it interesting that the brand “Eat your vegetables” now belongs to a veggie chip company. Opportunity lost?

If you would like to watch the two-minute trailer, you can view it here and I encourage you to have a look.

The good news about the film (unlike some of the anti-sugar books) is he talks about the role of the sugars in fruits and vegetables in a really responsible way. In one scene, where he is about to drink another glass of highly processed juice, he shows the equivalent volume of fresh apples that would need to be eaten to get that much juice. It works out to four large whole apples to get the glass of juice.

He then speaks about how Mother Nature has created fibre and pectin and other components in fresh fruit which are natural over-consumption inhibitors. So yes, while fruit does have fructose and chemically it breaks down to be sugar, the ‘naturalness’ of it in combination with fibre means it is difficult to over indulge on fruit in its natural state. It is a really balanced and informative approach that is definitely pro fruit and pro vegetable.

There is no doubt sugar is shaping up to be the grocery shelf battleground for the next few years. Having just done retail work in Texas with a client, I spent two days wandering supermarket aisles and produce aisles and taking over 600 pictures of packaging and on-pack communications.

What caught my eye is just how much FMCG (processed foods) companies are back pedalling on the sugar issue – but these buggers are clever. They are leveraging their packaging to be a billboard for their new ‘healthy’ status.

From a consumer point of view, surely a tomato sauce bottle that now says big and bold, “Now with 75% less sugar” is an attractive proposition and a bottle worth buying. Never mind it should have NEVER had that much sugar in it in the first place, but no one is paying attention to that. People are paying attention to the new norm and the new norm is FMCG products are once again encroaching on fresh produce share of stomach as they move to healthier formulations.

Even Coke has reformulated with its new Life product.

Listen people – I cannot tell you enough that if you are not treating your fresh produce packaging as a billboard to capture attention and create an emotional connection with shoppers – you are missing out on business.

I believe on-pack messaging has become the supermarket battle ground. And I really do believe it is us (fresh produce) against them, where them is the over sugared, over salted, over fatty products that are now ‘healthier’.

So the takeaway message is this: grab a bag of your beautiful, naturally healthy fresh produce. What does your bag, i.e. your billboard, say? If you are simply pragmatically describing what’s inside the bag…you are not prepared for battle and the war for share of stomach.

I help clients find gaps and new opportunities for business and then help them bring this to life via their packaging and category strategy to drive sales and value growth. If you want to learn more about this, drop me an email.

www.freshfruitportal.com