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03.31.2005

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01.27.2005 "Redefining Our (Consumer) Understanding of Functional Foods"

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How Consumers Make Sense Of Functional Foods

The food industry has revived its desire to fill America's pantries and refrigerators with "functional foods." The problem is, while industry insiders make declarations along the lines of "all foods in the future will be functional," most American consumers just aren't thinking about their food that way.

The more targeted the health benefit we Americans may seek, or the more likely we want to reverse some negative health condition in our bodies, the more we all run for pills, pills, pills. Even core wellness consumers run for pills...they call them "supplements." For the rest of us, the decision to buy food marketed as functional generally happens right at the shelf. And the logic behind this decision may surprise marketers. So, what explains why some "functional foods," like orange juice with added calcium, fly off the shelves and other functional foods, like cholesterol-removing oatmeal are such a bomb?

Consumers make their best quick guess at how functional foods come to be
At first Laura was attracted to the translucent pink soft drink I showed her during a recent one-on-one interview. I'd brought it along as a thought-starter, for use during an interview about functional foods. She thought it might be something she'd like to try. But then she looked a little closer at the bottle, and waffled, declaring:

"Is that a problem?"

"What do you mean?"

"How do you usually think of it?"

So, Laura thought it odd that something she conceptually understood as opaque was inserted into something else that was clear. Calcium, in that beverage, didn't quite make sense to her. And if she'd noticed it in a store, she would have simply walked away.

When consumers encounter a new functional food (or beverage) at retail, how do they understand what makes it functional, and if the product is desirable? Consumers construct a story based on the readily available cues on a product package, and what they know historically about that kind of product. We call those stories "ingredient narratives."

Ingredient narratives are simple(!) stories about how a food came to be
With the exception of core wellness consumers, people don't want to put a lot of work into understanding their food. Most consumers prefer to construct nominal narratives. That is, they will often qualify something as desirable or acceptable based on a single or small number of characteristics rather than exhaustively investigating a product and its origins (something that core wellness consumers, who are rarely attracted to functional foods, will do).

Symbolic logic builds bridges
Understanding functionality nominally and not exhaustively, consumers draw upon simple, symbolic logic to connect products to their functionality. For example:

Consumers can easily draw simple connections between the fruit that often appears in yogurt, and the citrus fruit that contains vitamin C, as illustrated in the diagram, below. In a couple short steps, yogurt with vitamin C seems, well, natural. But don't think that consumers will go beyond a couple short steps in explaining a product, especially in a retail environment...because they won't.

Essential properties inform symbolic logic
Calcium can be added to yogurt without raising too many eyebrows. Why? Ideas about the essential properties of substances can also contribute to making them attractive in functional foods. Like Laura, many other people think of calcium as either white and milky or white and powdery. "White and milky" isn't much of a stretch for yogurt.
It's already in there
Yogurt with added probiotic bacteria is looked upon favorably. Most all consumers are comfortable with augmenting an existing property or constituent in a food. Tomato sauces with added lycopene, which occurs naturally in tomatoes, are very acceptable as functional foods, providing the consumer knows what lycopene is and does not think it is "some weird chemical." Try adding lycopene to yogurt and, well, the product may not be received so well by consumers.
Cultural familiarity promotes acceptance
Orange juice with added calcium sells briskly. Why? It has history. Orange juice has been fortified for quite some time, and at this point there seems nothing odd about extra vitamins and/or minerals in it.

There are multiple paths to a purchase
Consumers will "qualify" a functional food as acceptable based on ingredient narratives supported by any of the following:

Beliefs about essential properties of substances (vitamin C naturally occurs in citrus fruit, calcium is white and milky, etc.)
The idea that augmentation of what naturally occurs in a product is okay
Preexisting cultural familiarity

However, beliefs about natural properties of substances, as we saw in Laura's case, can also keep products out of the grocery cart.

Consumers have some ideas about what common vitamins and minerals should look and feel like. Food marketers need to pay very close attention to popular notions about whatever they add to products, and make it easy for consumers to expediently construct narratives while standing in the grocery store aisle.

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