Perspectives: Big Food dominates tastebuds so how can healthier alternatives compete?

16th June 2023 By Contributor | contact@foodticker.co.nz | @foodtickernz

Improving the quality of our food requires understanding the past and knowing where eaters are coming from with their tastes, writes Mike Lee, co-CEO of US-based Alpha Food Labs and co-founder of The Future Market.

This past February, better-for-you ketchup brand Sir Kensington’s discontinued its flagship product, ceding victory to the iconic Big Food staple that is Heinz.

Sir Kensington’s ketchup, made with higher quality ingredients and no high fructose corn syrup or “natural” flavourings, was dead set on dethroning the ketchup king, and made a valiant effort over its 13 year lifespan, but ultimately couldn’t find enough sustainable demand to keep it alive.

Sold to Unilever in 2017, Sir K’s still makes an assortment of mayonnaise, mustard, and sauce products, but is now without the product that put them on the map.

Meanwhile, Heinz owns around 60% of the ketchup market and its parent company, Kraft-Heinz, pulled in nearly US$26.5bn in revenue in 2022. To many, Heinz is the gold standard for ketchup.

I was hooked on Heinz early, growing up in the Midwest in the 80s and 90s with prominently labelled dispensers of Heinz ketchup and mustard in my elementary, middle, and high school cafeterias. It was the only ketchup my parents stocked at home and I would be suspicious of restaurants that didn’t have Heinz and instead served the mysterious “fancy ketchup” of unknown provenance and composition. I didn’t eat ketchup all the time, but when I did, it had to be Heinz.

I still hold Heinz up as the standard for ketchup even though I know it’s laced with high fructose corn syrup and flavour boosted with synthesised flavour concentrates, a.k.a “natural flavourings”. Even though Sir K’s was made with better ingredients, my tastebuds had already been colonised over the past 25 years by Heinz. Because there weren’t many alternatives, Heinz ketchup influenced my palate so much that when I eventually tried “better” ketchup brands, I rejected them because they didn’t taste like ketchup as defined by Heinz.

The difficulty of unlearning flavours

I know how important it is to support food companies who are making real food that comes from sustainable or regenerative sources. I’ve had the privilege of dining at some of the world’s best restaurants, from Alinea to Chez Panisse. I volunteered on the board of an emergency food bank for years that also taught cooking and nutrition to its customers. I can even wax poetic about the role and composition of various fermented bean pastes across Asian cuisines.

Yet, despite having all these worldy food experiences and opinions, I still have a soft spot for the Kraft mac and cheese from a box that brought me so much comfort and joy as a kid. These kinds of contradictions are everywhere for me. I get my meat from a local butcher that sources their grass-fed beef from a local farm, yet will gladly snack on a bag of Doritos on the way there. I’m passionate about supporting ramen shops that lovingly make their broth, noodles, and toppings from scratch using the best ingredients, yet am equally passionate about my favourite instant ramen brands. My parents taught me (metaphorically) to appreciate champagne and beer equally, which means I know and love high quality food but have a strange penchant for mass produced, “lowbrow” foods too.

The allure of classic junk foods, scientifically formulated to hit all our pleasure centres while riding atop decades of nostalgia made possible with billions of dollars of advertising and distribution deals, is sometimes too hard to resist even for the most dedicated food lover. I’m not the only one who indulges in these guilty pleasures. Adrian Rivera, writing in the New York Times, chronicled his personal journey and love of ultra-processed foods, despite growing up into a knowledgeable, worldly foodie. During the pandemic, after many years of Small Food trying to overtake Big Food, classic CPG brands had surges in sales as frazzled citizens flocked back to comfort foods like Pepperidge Farm Goldfish to soothe their nerves from a global pandemic. The pervasiveness of these brands shows the power that Big Food has had in creating taste memories that set people’s expectations about a food category from a very young age where our preferences are forming.

I wanted to love Sir K’s ketchup right out of the gate, but 25+ years of eating Heinz had gaslighted me into thinking that’s what ketchup should be. I needed to unlearn how Heinz tasted before I would be ready to fall in love with Sir K’s ketchup. That’s not a knock on the flavour of Sir K’s, which is clearly of higher quality, but asking me to immediately throw away the Heinz in my fridge to replace it with Sir K’s was like asking me to suddenly start speaking Latin full-time. Like languages, young brains soak up early food memories like sponges and it’s easy for them to pick up dietary habits and preferences that will stay with them for a long time.

In almost every category where there’s a more natural, wholesome product trying to replace a more highly processed legacy brand, the natural product usually tastes like a more homemade, simple version of that food. Take peanut butter. I grew up eating JIF and the first time I tried a freshly ground peanut butter from Whole Foods, my tongue barely recognized what it was. Decades of conditioning to the fact that peanut butter needs to be quite sweet created antibodies in me that rejected the more pure, unadorned peanut butter. My head knew that the freshly ground peanut butter was the better choice, but my heart still screamed for that little sugar rush that came from JIF.

This tension happens in a lot of food categories and represents one of the biggest triumphs for Big Food: successfully programming tastebuds to recognise their ultra-processed food products as the platonic ideal of foods in every category, from ketchup to peanut butter to mac and cheese. This creates a big flavour obstacle for better-for-you brands who try to sell their minimally processed, lower sugar, free from artificial additive foods to a public that’s been trained to love the artificial versions of those foods. And while millions of people have unlearned the pleasures of ultra-processed foods in favour of more wholesome foods, there are still many more millions of people still addicted to the artificial versions.

Better than what?

Even though Sir K’s lost the ketchup battle, it was one of the factors that precipitated ingredient change at Heinz, which now makes organic, no sugar, and other “clean label” variants of their ketchup. The whole industry was moving that way anyway, but the presence of Sir K’s was a very direct and real force that probably accelerated those clean label changes. Sir K’s didn’t win the game, but it helped change how it was played.

Enduring food innovation happens when eaters are ready to accept a new food product in their lives. Building a better future of food also depends on understanding the past and knowing where eaters are coming from with their tastes.

Today’s kids will grow up with Big Food having less of an influence on their tastebuds because there are so many more options from more independent, progressive brands. The food landscape is wildly different than it was 20 years ago and it’s conceivable that many children will grow up eating virtually no packaged food at all, or at least the more natural versions.

When trying to judge how successful a new food product might be, it’s useful to think about the taste memories that exist within your target audience. What did your ideal eater eat before your product? How deeply entrenched is that food in their lives? How have their tastes and expectations of quality changed because of that food? Does your target eater have Big Food Stockholm Syndrome, or are their tastebuds open to embracing food that’s made with more integrity? Food innovators have to understand that taste memories develop not necessarily around the most superior, foodie approved product, but around the things that are the most present and have some kind of positive nostalgia surrounding them.

It’s not fair that a high fructose corn syrup laden product beats out the product with minimally processed, whole ingredients. But it happens in ketchup and other categories and shows the deeply entrenched influence Big Food has had over our tastebuds. Many new food brands tout themselves as being “better for you” or having “better taste,” but you have to ask the question, “better than what?” There is no such thing as an objectively better tasting or healthful food. It’s all relative to an individual’s pre-existing ideas and relationship with food that have probably been influenced by decades of Big Food marketing and food science wizardry.

In the case of Sir Kensington’s and Heinz, it appears that the public believes that “sweet and familiar” equals “better” ketchup. This might be maddening for supporters of the good food movement to witness, but it’s a stark reminder that we still have a long way to go in loosening the stranglehold that some of the world’s most iconic food brands still have on eaters everywhere.

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Mike Lee is the co-founder and co-CEO of Alpha Food Labs, an NYC-based food innovation company that helps companies create innovation strategies and new products that are better for people, planet, and palate.

Lee is also the founder of The Future Market, a futurist food lab that explores what our food system could look like in the next 5-25 years.