Companies may have their reasons for putting certain ingredients in their products. When people affix a negative label to them, we often wonder are these ingredients really harmful or do they just sound bad? We can only hope that the FDA will ferret out the bad stuff and make the right decision for us. After all, professional marketers know that the FDA is a stickler about what we can say on food and beverage labels. Even if we know an ingredient promotes health, such as oat products lower cholesterol, the FDA does not allow us to come out and say that.
However, in recent years, it has been consumers, consumer rights organizations, and company insiders that have alerted the public to FDA-approved ingredients that, at the very least, sound as if they are harmful? How have these “amateurs” captured everyone’s attention? By effectively branding ingredients with repulsive-sounding names and propagating their creations through social and traditional media. The marketing term for using social media to trash an ingredient, product, or company is hijacked media
Fire retardant BVO in Gatorade
In the latest case, 15-year-old Sarah Kavanaugh created an online petition asking PepsiCo for the removal of BVO (brominated vegetable oil) from Gatorade once she discovered it is a flame-retardant chemical that is banned as a food ingredient in Japan and EU countries. Why is it banned? According to a Scientific American article, it is stored in human tissues, and in large doses, it has been linked to behavioral and reproductive problems in mice. As of this writing, her petition garnered over 200,000 signatures, and PepsiCo has announced that it will be removing this ingredient from Gatorade. However, the public should know that BVO is an ingredient in roughly 10% of the sodas (not Coke or Pepsi) consumed in the US – including Mountain Dew, Squirt, Fanta Orange, Sunkist Pineapple, Gatorade Thirst Quencher Orange, Powerade Strawberry Lemonade, and Fresca Original Citrus. Don’t panic. The FDA says the quantities of BVO in these drinks are safe, but some say the FDA has not sufficiently studied the tissue storage issue. Who to believe?
Pink Slime
Beef Products Inc. recently filed a lawsuit against ABC News for $1.2 billion in damages because it says in that ABC “caused consumers to believe that our lean beef is not beef at all – that it's an unhealthy pink slime, unsafe for public consumption, and that somehow it got hidden in the meat.”
Who invented the name pink slime? Euphemistically called “lean finely textured beef” by the food industry, pink slime is the moniker given to this ingredient by a USDA microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein. He referred to this ingredient as “pink slime” in a private email to colleagues.
What is “pink slime” and how is it made? Pink slime is made from “throw-away” beef trimmings that are heated and spun in a centrifuge to separate out the fat. The “lean meat” remains are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill any harmful bacteria (a process used in the processing of many food products to make them safer). It is then flash frozen and pressed into usable shape for further processing into ground beef and other meat products. Any way you slice it, this all sounds really bad.
What started the viral negative word-of-mouth pyramid? According to an Ad Age post by E.J. Shultz, in April of 2011, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver somehow got wind of the email and made it a topic on his TV Show. In March of last year, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer broadcast an unflattering segment about pink slime as a cheap filler in ground beef products that was once only used in dog food. This caused a Texas mom, Bettina Elias Siegel, to circulate an online petition via her blog (The Lunch Tray) and gathered over 200,000 signatures in 8 days to remove pink slime from school food. Soon fast food chains, supermarkets, and others began distancing themselves from the ingredient assuring their customers that they no longer sell meat products that use pink slime.
A branding term nobody can ignore.This negative viral pyramid spread like wildfire because pink slime sounds disgusting, forms negative visual images in the brain, is difficult to ignore, and is easy to pass along in both traditional and social media. When people learn that it is made from “throw-away” parts of beef carcasses, treated with an ammonia compound, and formerly used in dog food, the negative images are multiplied. The result has been economically devastating for “lean finely textured beef” manufacturers and meat processors.
Beetle Juice
In March, the public learned that Starbucks routinely used a red dye made from crushed beetles in its strawberry-flavored mixed drinks, red velvet whoopee pie, raspberry swirl cake, and other red-colored products. Perhaps the public does not know that this red dye, referred to as carmine dye (or cochineal dye after the name of the beetle) is commonly used in foods, lipsticks, and shampoo. Since it is made from “natural” ingredients, most believe it is healthier than other red dyes, such as Red 40, that have known side effects.
Starbucks routinely used cochineal dye because it positions its products as using only natural ingredients. A vegan Starbucks barista anonymously blew the whistle by emailing “this dish is vegetarian” web site that certain Starbucks drinks contained this dye. Media, such as the Los Angeles Times, started using the term “beetle juice” to brand the message into the brains of its readers. This caused quite a stir with the public since beetle juice sounds not much more appetizing than pink slime. Furthermore, the Starbucks offerings that use it are not vegan, not vegetarian, and not kosher. Because of these issues, Starbucks did not win trust points with its customers who are now wondering what other interesting ingredients may be other Starbucks products.
As with pink slime, beetle juice has the branding characteristics of easy to remember, easy to pass on, and “hard to swallow” in a food product.
Anti-dusting agents and silicon dioxide
Taco Bell felt compelled to post the ingredients in its taco meat filling when a former employee alleged in a lawsuit that its taco filling did not meet the FDA requirements for ground beef. Two ingredients in particular caught the attention of news media, talk shows, and comedy programs – soybean-based anti-dusting agent and silicon dioxide anti-caking agent. As with pink slime and beetle juice, these ingredients are common in many processed foods, but they sound really bad as food ingredients. In fact Stephen Colbert did a very funny piece in which he said, “You might recognize silicon dioxide by its street name – sand.” The cumulative effect of the negative publicity from the lawsuit and its aftermath caused a decline in Taco Bell sales in 2011.
Hijacked Media
The branding of ingredients that create decidedly negative images is one of the hazards of doing business in the era of social media. People with a negative agenda or a justified complaint about ingredients in your products might give them an effectively damaging label (fire retardant, pink slime, beetle juice, dusting agents or sand) that create rapidly-growing viral pyramids that can do significant damage to your sales and corporate image. Marketers have a relatively new term for this process – hijacked media. It is the opposite of earned media, where fans spread the positive word about your company and products. The best you can do if you are the victim of hijacked media is to use the appropriate fact and rumor procedures.
In the case of ingredients that are harmful, however, we should be grateful to creative people that effectively brand bad ingredients for our own good.
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