Dive Brief:
- Environmental Working Group (EWG) has sent a letter to top cereal manufacturers like General Mills, Kellogg, and Post asking them to expedite the FDA's Nutrition Facts label changes before the deadline and post the information on their websites as soon as possible.
- Cereal manufacturers have more than two years to comply with the labeling changes, which reflect larger, more accurate serving sizes (now 40g of cereal compared to the former 30g). These serving sizes will have significant implications for the sugar content posted on cereal packaging and marketing campaigns for major brands.
- "When the FDA’s new standards kick in, none of the 10 most widely advertised kids’ cereals will meet the industry’s self-imposed limit on sugar in cereals advertised to kids set by the Council of Better Business Bureaus," EWG said in a news release.
Dive Insight:
Manufacturers of cereal brands could either reduce the cereal's sugar content or raise self-imposed limits to maintain brands' marketing strategies. It's another case of manufacturers having to balance what consumers say they want (healthier products) with what they actually buy (products that taste good, including those with sweeteners).
General Mills and Kellogg have already begun reformulating their cereal portfolios without artificial colors and flavors, which limits their choices for sugar replacements.
In its letter to the three major cereal manufacturers, EWG writes, "We are reaching out to you as an industry leader and inviting you to use your position to continue changing the marketplace for American children — and to do so ahead of your competitors." EWG also highlights the availability of information regarding recalculated serving sizes and new sugar content for these cereals and more than 80,000 other products on its Food Scores database.
Beating other competitors to releasing updated Nutrition Facts labels may be a strategy manufacturers consider. General Mills and Kellogg made a similar move earlier this year when they joined Campbell and other companies in announcing portfolio-wide GMO labeling efforts months before Vermont's mandatory labeling law takes effect July 1.
But if executives choose to release this information before the deadline, whether on their website or packaging, they're going to do so on their own terms. In October 2014, when EWG first launched Food Scores, the Grocery Manufacturers Association released a statement challenging the validity of the rating system. GMA described Food Scores as "severely flawed," "void of ... scientific rigor and objectivity," and "based almost entirely on assumptions" rather than confirmatory testing.
For the sake of transparency, these manufacturers may compromise by putting that information on their websites sooner rather than later. Manufacturers will have to carefully calculate the packaging redesign and any retooling of marketing messages that promoted health benefits of products that now exceed FDA's sugar limits.