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Choices by the Food Industry

I went to talk to Melanie Walshe, a food technologist for McFoodies LTD. Melanie works with food companies to develop their food products, from Muesli bars to salad dressings to pre-packaged meals.

Deciding how much sugar to put in, she says, is “trial and error. You taste the product, and you might tweak the formulation a bit to make sure that everything tastes just right.” The product is then taken to a panel of tasters. “Are they qualified tasters? Who are the people on this panel?” I asked her.

“In smaller companies, it’ll generally be the marketing manager and maybe even the office staff—anyone that you can kind of rope in to come and taste it. A larger company might be able to afford to run sensory panels to get feedback from their actual consumers,” Melanie explained.

The marketers are supposed to know what the consumers want, so if they’ve done their job properly, they’ve done the research.

I get why it’s in ice creams and cakes, I tell her, but why is sugar in everything?

“It’s cheap,” she tells me, “so often it’s used to re-balance the cost of a product—for example, a dressing. And if it was an oil-based dressing, you’d take some of the oil out because it’s an expensive ingredient, and bump up the sugar.”

So, companies are looking for the cheaper products, and to make the cheaper products, they expect to put in more sugar to reach that cheap price.

“Yes,” Melanie affirms. “Marketers have a view that consumers won’t go beyond a certain price point.”

So, is the amount of sugar in food really about consumer demand? Or is it about profits?

As Dr. Lustig points out, “The food industry has been upping and upping the dose over the past century and in particular in the past 30 years, and they found that when they did that, we bought more. So this is their juggernaut. This how they are making money, they don’t want to stop, and they won’t stop until they are remanded to stop. The question is, who is going to remand them? That’s the question for debate.”