The local newspaper delivers the Sunday stuffers on Saturday, so today was the first crack at the "it's New Years--time for a diet" advertisements.
And if you go by the ads, the bloom is off the low carb rose. Not because no one is offering low carb products, it's because almost all of the food concerns are jumping on the low carb bandwagon. Given what they did to low fat (hello trans-fats and corn syrup), I'm not holding out hope that they will get this right, either.
So, we have Slim-Fast (Unilever) now offering a low-carb drink, Kraft (R J Reynolds) pushing their cheese as a low carb alternative (well, yeah, cheese is on Atkins, that's true), and Lean Cuisine (Stouffer's, which is a subsidiary of Nestle) is introducing a line of low carb frozen foods. All seem to have decided that using a process colour one off of Atkins blue is a good marketing tool. even MorningStar Farms (Kellogg's) is pointing out that their soy goodies are low carb, and tasty--really!
Absent from the fray is Con Agra, who does Healthy Choice. Healthy Choice is firmly entrenched in the low fat camp (and the reason why you'll see a lot of low fat food packaging with an inordinate amount of green), so I'm not sure how they could add a line without seriously impacting their marketing message. I checked their web site, and it doesn't seem to be anything under another.
Heinz is currently sticking with Weight Watchers red, and since Weight Watchers insists on my having Netscape or MSIE, guess I'm not going to check out their site (note to Weight Watchers--get with the rest of the world and support some other browsers. Or maybe it's just that Safari and Mozilla users have better taste than to eat your watery, underseasoned crap, so you gave up on selling to them. Whatever.)
My main worry is that with the commoditizaton of low carb is that the usual pack of penny-pinchers will come in and start mucking with the formulae--better to increase that margin, right? The trouble is, low carb appears to have a smaller margin of error than low calorie or low fat. Start sneaking in half grams of carbs here and there, futz with portion sizes, or start heavily using sugar alcohols (YMMV on sugar alcohols--some people do well on such, some people might as well be chowing down Ex-Lax), and you're going to have a lot of people who can't figure out why they aren't losing weight when they're eating all the "right things".
Which is pretty much what happened with low fat--you had people chowing down an entire package of low fat cookies or hoovering a large bag of bake potato chips, not thinking that just because it's half the calories with 1/3 of the fat, doesn't mean you can eat four five servings of the stuff.
While the Atkins people will tell you that it isn't the calories, but the low carb, underestimate the power of massive rationalization when it comes to chowing down on way too much low carb whatever. If the food companies make it easy to not "count" the carbs, the carbs will not be counted!
Posted by lsefton at January 3, 2004 12:05 PM