We Need a Good Food Fight

I guess the slow progress of food manufacturers is to be expected. It is well known in business that cost minimization is a long and slow process. Carbon is a new cost - a cost that isn't even imposed yet (at least in this country).

A much faster acting corporate motivator for innovation is growth. And in the food industry growth is market share. As I've written about, food can be a key front in the fight. Government regulation won't move the food industry fast enough. Market share will. We need to make this a fight about market share. We need a good food fight!

In the ongoing fight for market share, the food industry brings out their big guns. True, P&G for example spent $2.2 billion last year on R&D. But they spent $9.4 billion on advertising worldwide ($3.7 in the U.S.). In total, the top-5¹ spent a staggering $21.7 billion in advertising worldwide and $7.1 billion in the U.S. alone.

What if a key advertising message was about green-house-gases? What if a portion of the ad budget was re-directed to R&D to reduce product footprints? That would set up quite the food fight. Who doesn't like a good food fight? This fight needs to be started by consumers. And when it's over, we will all be smiling!

Notes: (1) P&G, Unilever, J&J, Nestle and Coca-Cola.