Marketing Wellness: Fruit in the Food and Beverage Industry

Marketing Wellness: Fruit in the Food and Beverage Industry
Fruit has a bright future in the functional foods sector as consumers look to obtain health benefits in a natural way.
by Julian Mellentin

Marketing the intrinsic healthfulness of foods could become the guiding strategy for food producers everywhere; and no one stands to benefit from it more than producers of fruit and companies that intend to make fruit a significant ingredient and/or marketing proposition within their products.

If you are in the business of whole fruit, fruit beverages or fruit ingredients you can look forward to a bright future, propelled by the wellness trend. Fruit, it seems, may turn out to be the future of functional food. More than any other food type, fruit has a “halo of health”. It is a halo that’s being made brighter all the time as a steady stream of news about fruit’s benefits, such as fiber and antioxidants, makes its way into a media eager for simple, positive stories about healthy eating. What’s more, the sweetness of fruits, as well as their taste, texture and portability, makes them much more appealing to consumers than almost any other food as an “all-natural” way to eat more healthily. What we are witnessing in the market-place is a remarkable growth in consumer interest in intrinsically healthy whole fruit and fruit juices and a perception that foods containing fruit—snack bars and breakfast cereals for example—are somehow healthier.

Look around at the success stories in the global business and it quickly becomes apparent that most of these stories involve beverages, which have the edge in terms of perceived convenience benefits. As a result, it isn’t surprising that it is in beverages, rather than whole fruit, that demand for products based on healthy fruit is strongest.Pom Wonderful, which has come from nowhere to be a $60 million brand in an astonishingly short time, is a model of how to take new fruit benefits to market. The success of this product is simply that the company marketing it is not science-led but brand-led. Pom Wonderful combines innovative packaging, clever merchandising and delicious taste to deliver a health benefit, but one that is communicated softly.

The success of pomegranate—which is now being initiated by other “new fruit”, such as the Brazilian açai berry—suggests we are just at the beginning of a period in which fruit products might be about to rival dairy products as the drivers of innovation and sales growth in the global nutrition business.

The growing interest in fruit is partly an indication that the most commonly adopted worldwide strategy in the food industry today— and one that is the least risky and is proving successful for an increasing number of foodstuffs—is marketing intrinsic healthfulness. The rapid evolution of nutrition over the last decade has revealed the intrinsic health benefits of many components of the diet, and these have been turned into marketing messages. One of the best examples of the power of this strategy is cranberry juice, which has seen its sales rise by hundreds of percent since 1994, when the link between cranberries and their intrinsic ability to reduce incidence of urinary tract infection (UTI) was first established.

The strategy of selling the whole fruit—natural and unprocessed—to consumers. In the case of fruit, it’s a strategy that has so far been successful for blueberries, whose size, taste and resilience makes then an easy snack product or dessert. But to have any effect, this communications effort needs to be serious and backed by sufficient investment. It is not a one-time effort and it won’t yield quick results; it requires a consistent, year-in, year-out commitment to building a longterm health halo for your fruit.

The combination of extreme convenience and health is a persuasive selling message. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of fruit drinks and smoothies, which are increasingly positioned as delivering one or more of the recommended five servings a day of fruit and vegetables providing all of the benefits—and taste—of fruit with none of the mess and inconvenience. To illustrate the point, beverages are perhaps the fastest-growing segment for integrating blueberries into new formulas. In the first six months of 2005, a dozen new blueberry-juice products hit the market in the United States alone, and all were reported to be getting significant traction.

Some fruits, such as the blueberries, have characteristics that— luckily for their growers—make them very suitable as ingredients “in their natural state” for inclusion in snack bars, muffins and breakfast cereals. But the majority of fruit processors must focus hard on technical and application developments to find ways to make their fruit technically competitive for use as ingredients in other processed foods.This strategy has proven effective for Ocean Spray, which has successfully developed ways of making cranberries a value-adding ingredient in an everincreasing range of applications.

One area of interest to researchers is breeding varieties that have higher levels of naturally occurring bioactives than are found in commercially available fruit varieties. An example is the high antioxidant blueberry—one that delivers a much bigger dose of antioxidants than conventional blueberries. The aim of such developments is to create a fruit that is truly differentiated and hopefully commands better pricing and more added value in the marketplace. The reality is that (to our knowledge) no one has yet managed to successfully achieve such differentiation. Value-added is created not just by additional health benefits (a common misapprehension in the nutrition business) but by strategic marketing. The challenge of communicating enhanced health benefits is difficult enough for fruits bred in a conventional manner. For genetically-modified (GM) crops, the challenge of communication is a whole order of magnitude higher. In most countries, consumer acceptance of GM foods is still low—and putting aside any arguments over the merits of GM, marketing enhanced health benefits from a GM source would be creating a huge challenge that no sensible, profitconscious company should take.

For sales of any fruit to grow, consumer awareness of its health benefits must grow; this simply cannot be achieved without investment in consumer education and knowledge building. Having benefits proven by science is not enough, as there has to be an effort to make those benefits easy to understand and to interest the media in discussing them.

In all cases it also helps if a health benefit can be clearly connected to existing consumer beliefs and knowledge. Pom Wonderful, for example, has benefited from consumers becoming significantly conscious of the overall nutritional and medical benefits of antioxidants, affirming the importance of the substances in consumers’ minds. It is the health halo that matters, not the health claim. People make healthy food choices based on information from a variety of sources beyond just a health claim. A claim, if granted, should only be used as one small part of a comprehensive communications strategy, and spending time and money seeking health claims is not the best investments for any business.

Julian Mellentin is the director of The Centre for Food & Health Studies, a company that has provided research, analysis and forecasting of the global nutrition business since 1995. Mellentin is also the editor of New Nutrition Business, a long-established international journal on the global nutrition business (www.new-nutrition.com). This article excerpted with permission from the new report “Superfruit”.

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