The problem with marketing food is that, when you get down to it, it's just food. The snack industry looks back fondly on such shining moments as the creation of "cool ranch" flavor and the transition to "wild cherry" from what had previously been merely "cherry." But you can't count on a breakthrough in flavor technology every time you want to give your product a boost.
The snack aisles are covered in bright colors and happy cartoon faces, so it's more important than ever to stand out. How can you do this? Here are some recent advances in, if not food, then at least the marketing of food.
100-Calorie Packs
With Atkins resigned to the same dietary periphery as The Zone and the Hollywood Diet, the food industry is on the edge of its tenterhooks waiting for the next diet fad to beach itself on the American imagination. In the meantime, marketers are turning to the magic of excessive packaging to fill the gap, taking foods from Wheat Thins to Chips Ahoy and dividing them into individually wrapped units of 100 calories each.
This is because extensive scientific evidence shows that round numbers lead to weight loss. Eating an entire box of Cheese Nips is unquestionably unhealthy, unless it's really easy to do math afterward. This is why people in countries that use the metric system – which is to say pretty much any country except the United States – are much slimmer.
Whole Grain Foods
When I was a young lad, as opposed to the adult lad that I am now, "whole grain" meant something brown that you had to chew for a half-hour. As I was raised by a hippie mom in the Age of Carob, I encountered much more whole grain than I would have liked. I am familiar with whole grain in the same sense that a sewer worker is familiar with methane.
And yet, I'm starting to see "whole grain" foods that defy the very laws of physics and fiber. For instance, Trix is now whole grain. I refuse to buy into a reality in which the terms "whole grain" and "grapity purple" can be used in the same sentence.
Even stranger is the availability of whole grain white bread. I bought some, and it's white bread all right. This goes against everything I've learned. Healthy bread needs to be the color of dust and have visible chunks of what may or may not be chaff. Healthy bread should suck the joy and life from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, assuming you haven't already sucked the joy and life from it by using the sort of peanut butter where the oil rises to the top, and the sort of jelly that's essentially just fruit that someone stepped on.
This white stuff is for beaming, clear-skinned children who sing in commercials and play softball without getting dirty.
Portable Packs
As more Americans adopt an active lifestyle – spending their day shuttling between school, work, soccer, the alley behind the medical supply store, church, the suicide prevention center, that one area near the lake where grown men sit in their cars for hours at a time, the dry cleaner, the Batcave and home – it becomes more important than ever that they not stop eating.
Remember how it used to be so difficult to transport yogurt? When yogurt only came in 50-pound reinforced steel containers that had to be moved using federally regulated yogurt transportation vehicles? Well, they've fixed that. Now you can get yogurt in an easy-to-transport package with a dumb pun for a name: Go-Gurt! While this has not been vetted by a peer-reviewed scientific journal, reports are that it is like yogurt with attitude.
And how many times have you said to yourself, "I would love to leave the house, but that would mean being away from my beloved Pop-Tarts"? Well, they make Pop-Tarts in portable form now. And they make Cheetos in a package that can fit into your car cup holder! At least until they do a study of the effect of nasty orange residue on steering wheel handling that leads to a nationwide recall and several bitter class-action suits.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a world-class stone thrower and builder of glass houses.
