18 Nov 2011 Confessions of a former Big Food executive
“The Blog of Bruce Bradley” is a new blog, of many, about alleged food industry deception, but with an interesting twist. The author, Bruce Bradley, spent over 15 years as a food marketer at companies like General Mills, Pillsbury, and Nabisco. He has since, in his words, “become more educated about the risks and environmental impact of eating processed foods” and is now a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) enthusiast. This article on Grist questions Bradley about the industry, his blog, and what really goes on in processed food companies.
Q. On your website you write that you’ve “seen some disturbing trends in the food industry over the past 20 years.” What have you found most insidious?
A. The landscape has changed dramatically since I started my career at Nabisco in 1992. In response to Wall Street profit pressures and the growing power of retailers like Walmart, the food industry has undergone a tremendous wave of consolidation and cost cutting.
This has hurt our food supply in many ways. First, huge, multinational food companies now dominate the landscape. Wielding far greater lobbying power and much deeper pockets, these companies have been very successful in stagnating food regulation. Second, cost savings have been a key profit driver for the industry, but they’ve had a devastating impact on both food quality and food safety. Think factory farming and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), just to name a couple of examples. Third, as consumers’ health concerns have increased, processed food manufacturers have become even more aggressive in making dubious health claims or co-opting fad diets to market their brands and develop new products.
The net impact of this transformed landscape has been disastrous from a public health perspective — with obesity rates skyrocketing and a never-ending flood of food recalls.
Q. How does the food industry respond to those in the public health and nutrition arena who systematically call them out? Is there is a legitimate fear that one day “the people” will realize how unhealthy many of their products are?
A. The average person working at a food company doesn’t view public health and nutrition “food cops” as a threat. In fact, they are embracing many of the ideas coming from these sources. For example, books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma were extremely popular when I was at General Mills, and I learned about CSAs from a Research & Development scientist working on one of my teams.
Now if you’re talking about the Big Food company executives, I do think they feel threatened. However, most of these executives tend to dismiss those who “call them out” as wrong or misinformed, versus taking a serious look at changing their business model. After all, these executives and their companies have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo.
Q. On your blog you say, “confusion is one of the tried and true tools of the processed foods industry.” Can you say more about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways these companies confuse us?
A. I think one of the main ways the processed food industry is trying to grow and defend their business is by funding self-serving research….