Making Sense of Functional Foods

The food industry, it seems, is still as intent as ever to fill America’s pantries and refrigerators with foods they deem “functional”. The problem is, while industry insiders make declarations along the lines of “all foods in the future will be functional”, most American consumers aren’t thinking about their food that way.

Consider for a moment two recent offerings: Diet Coke Plus (the plus meaning added vitamins and minerals) and Tropicana Orange Juice with Omega-3. Both play the health and wellness card to influence consumers. If you were to wager, though, which one do you think has a better chance at long-term success with consumers?

Can Diet Coke Plus work with consumers? Perhaps with some. But given that carbonated soft drink (CSD) sales are slumping, adding in vitamins won’t save the category. Consumers who stopped using CSDs aren’t going to buy Diet Coke Plus; they are looking to get their nutrition from more “authentic” foods and beverages, as opposed to getting it from a more traditional, factory-produced beverage.

Consumers and industry insiders are often at odds over what constitutes real food. While food is the main character in consumers’ quests to lead healthier lives, the term functional food is not one consumers understand or use. If a food is going to boast a health benefit, it has to make sense to the consumer.

From the marketer’s perspective, consumers are looking to foods to help manage any number of health issues: high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and so on. From the consumer’s vantage point, however, the benefits from these foods need to be naturally occurring. Consumers must be able to easily connect a food product with the health claim accompanying it. For the average consumer, “food is food and medicine is medicine.”

Our research continues to bear this out as consumers choose fresh foods over foods that are fortified or enhanced. The health promotion and disease prevention benefits of fresh foods trump the health claims of fortified/enhanced foods and beverages. Functional foods can work, and be quite successful, if one understands how consumers make sense of it all.

From the consumer perspective, think of functional foods more from an ingredient level than a product level. Most successful functional foods are natural ones: oats, whole grains, nuts, flax and berries. They are showing up as ingredients in a lot of different products. Consumers understand why these ingredients are beneficial without needing a bunch of explanation from the manufacturer, which they may not trust, or be willing to spend time trying to understand, especially while standing at shelf in a store. These ingredients make sense. They’re simple, obvious and you don’t need a degree in chemistry or nutrition science to understand them. We hear consumers say things like, “I eat oats because they’re good for my heart,” not, “I’m really into plant stanols for cardiovascular benefits.”

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