The decline of processed foods and the rise of a new world order

 Peter Wennström is a leading brand consultant with more than 25 years experience at such outlets as Wennström Integrated, Health-Focus Europe and the Healthy Marketing Team, where he now serves as president. His FourFactors program is highly regarded by nutrition companies as a way to decipher the near-instant decisions made by today’s consumer at the point of purchase. We spoke to Wennström from his offices in Sweden.

NBJ: We’ve recently tracked a sales shift in the U.S. toward organic food, with that category growing at twice the rate of functional food and supplements. Is this a global trend?

Peter Wennström: By understanding the United States, you actually understand the world. I visited Estonia—one of the smallest countries in the world—a few weeks ago to do a quick trend exercise with food industry representatives. What did we find? Natural, unprocessed, “like we did it in the good ol’ days,” handmade, local, artisan, products with a real history, with provenance—these are the trends in Estonia. We’ve asked the same questions globally, and we get the same answers.

Healthy food started out as a motivation, a want, so companies added to products to make them healthier for me. That’s how health started out, as a motivation to buy. What we now see is that health products depend more on a permission to buy. Consumers now want convenient products that taste great, but they want them free from anything perceived as artificial. This is a huge rejection of the idea of processed foods and the conventional food industry. Many of our clients now talk about permissibility. The devil is in the details now. Consumers look at the ingredients in products and where those ingredients come from. They want to choose the products that sound the best.

NBJ: This sounds like a shift in the consumer psyche away from the bells and whistles of food science toward real fears of food villains like BPA, rBST, perhaps GMOs.

PW: We’ve talked for some time now about the importance of “the permission to buy” and “a reason to believe” in our clients’ approach to product development. What companies need to look at very carefully is a consumer’s reason to reject a product. That is actually what is happening out there now. Consumers are getting more and more reasons to reject a product. As companies open up their value chains, that chain is actively opened up even more by consumers and consumer organizations. As soon as someone improves their value chain—now we have organic farming, for example—then you don’t want something that is worse than organic farming. If you have a choice, you don’t want industrial farming if you can have organic farming. I see the value chain almost like a corridor with rooms, and that whole corridor is now starting to light up.

NBJ: How serious is this threat to the industrial food system?

PW: The consequence of these trends is not easy to digest for different parts of the food industry. We saw a global shift in roughly 2005 when the greatest health concerns for consumers globally began to cluster around nasties in your food, impurities in your food products. Instead of cancer or heart health, the biggest health concern across the world subtly shifted toward fear of things that shouldn’t be in the food products. Basically we are talking about perceived poisons, bad things coming out of the processed food system. This became even more evident with the melamine scandal in China and the growing aversion to pesticides in the U.S. and Europe.

This was a more subtle shift, but the implications are quite large. From that new point of view, consumers began to say, ‘We do not want industrial farming,’ and this is a trend that dovetails well with natural and continues to grow stronger and stronger. The truth for the food industry is that this is not a quick fix and it is not a trend that will just go away. We are in the middle of a large European survey about these challenges, and global companies realize today that they are stuck in business models that make things better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently. Those business models are coming to an end, in a way, because they have greater and greater problems in following the consumer. The consumer is heading in a different direction. ‘I want it organic. I want it local. I want it full of nutrition. I want variety. I don’t just want this one-size-fits-all. I want lots of different vegetables, I want lots of different grains’—this is a totally different paradigm to the present model.