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04.14.2005

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

For more Hartman Group articles on FOOD CULTURE, click here...

03.24.2005 "Convenient...and Fresh?: Evolving Food Culture in America"

11.11.2004 "What's for Dinner?: Understanding Meal Fragmentation as a Cultural Phenomenon"

10.26.2004 "What If It's Not About the Food After All"

09.23.2004 "Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture"

08.05.2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"

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Emerging Trends In Parenting The Healthy Eater: our Evolving Food Culture

While the trend toward consumer interest in healthier food alternatives for children will continue unabated - and likely intensify - in the coming years, the challenge remains to discover an effective way of meeting this need in a manner that truly resonates with both Mom and child.

More and more, our extensive in-home discussions with moms about how they manage their children's eating is revealing that what parents are really looking for when they express a desire for their children to eat more healthfully is much more than "the next kid's health food." While many parents who have put their children on organic dairy and other staple organic foods do care that these foods are free from harmful chemicals, preservatives, etc., there is a much larger concern at play, one that potentially threatens to undermine their efforts to teach their children good eating habits. As many moms instinctively know, good eating is as much about when and how much you eat as it is about what you eat.

Parents Don't Feel in Control Over How Much and When Their Children Eat

Today's parents feel powerful external influences - ill-conceived school cafeteria menus, open-access school vending machines, tempting offers from friends whose parents shower them with junk food, etc. - threatening to overtake their children when they are out of immediate parental supervision. While "organic" may be a concern at home...beyond the home, often the biggest concern is simply how to keep nutritionally unbalanced eating from happening, given that children are surrounded with opportunities to overeat in one food group without social censure, eat too much candy or soda from vending machines to which no one regulates access, or even to undereat by forgetting to eat enough in the absence of someone prompting them to.

What this tells us is that there is growing, tacit concern among parents about how food gets presented to children. And while the folk understanding of the "teenager" especially is of a young person who is able to eat almost anything without consequence, rising obesity among teens indicates that, collectively, some control has clearly been lost over a very basic thing: child food intake. The when, where and how of eating seems increasingly out of control...due in large part to the omnipresence of open access, socially unregulated food sources beyond the home, and the fact that the rules and restrictions of the at-home meal don't operate in the school environment, despite the energy spent refining the nutritional content of cafeteria menus.

Parents Don't Trust the School Menu

Parents into health and wellness at home, often forsake the school cafeteria, preferring to exert "remote control" over their children's daily diet by packing their lunches for them. Today, this is still often true for children in elementary school. However, the romance of June Cleaver packing a lunch for their teenage son is just not a reality for many older kids with busy parents. Often, kids are packing their own lunches or simply getting food at school like an adult consumer. Although some school districts and private schools actually spend a lot of time preparing food that is "healthy," they rarely create an environment where portion control and other aspects of how the child eats can be controlled. Each child is different. Do cafeteria servers really adjust portions to each child's needs? Do they even know each child well enough to make this kind of ad hoc adjustment as they plop down a scoop full of Mac 'N Cheese? An underserved child will simply go buy a vending machine snack by himself later in the day, if the meal he got served at lunch wasn't an adequate portion.

What all these questions insinuate is the parental desire to wrestle back some semblance of control over the eating habits of their child in a world where such control is increasingly perceived to be up for negotiation.

Forward-thinking brand managers interested in addressing this problem need to get beyond preachy messaging on the back of cereal boxes. Advice doesn't do anything practical to help Mom get in control. And, while innovating convenience foods that can go unrefrigerated in a backpack or a locker and yet still offer balanced nutrition (unlike the proverbial PB & J sandwich) seems like the wisest thing for a food manufacturer to do, we would actually advise them to look beyond consumer food products. This is mainly because it is very hard for manufacturers to allow customized portion control to occur in a CPG food product designed for "children." The same Lunchables, for example, may underfeed one 10-year-old male student and overfeed another one. The underfed may then grab a bag of chips to satisfy hunger and ingest a calorie overdose in the process...mainly because no one at school is there to say... "No!" The solution may come in turning our attention away from "the next food product" toward innovative, interactive, food-delivery and food-service solutions that engender a sense of social control over food disbursal to children at school. The goal here would be to ensure that meals are customized properly enough to make the vending machine less tempting (assuming that PTA members haven't petitioned successfully for their removal entirely).

What parent wouldn't appreciate the ability to log in on the Internet and have an input into his/her child's menu options at school, including the sizing of portions given to the child?

Or to track their children's daily lunch consumption?

Or to order their children's lunch and have it prepared at the school and carefully delivered to them by a person who truly acts as a "surrogate" mom at lunchtime?

More than offering natural or organic food on school menus, allowing parents to feed their own children vicariously through the school cafeteria would enhance the perception that their children are eating healthier and provide a much needed sense of control.

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