August 2003

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Savvy marketing could 'ad' up to better nutrition for kids

By Lori Williams

Even though the Texas Department of Agriculture, along with other agencies in other states, has nixed junk food for elementary and middle school students during the school day, most parents still shudder when they consider what their youngsters are eating at school snack bars.

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What children eat at school is an important part of their nutrition. As Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs told the Houston Chronicle in their August 6, 2003, edition, "The school food environment is critically important to their (the children’s) well-being."

Behavioral scientists at Baylor College of Medicine are in agreement and are seeking to change middle school students’ behavior at the snack bar by taking a page out of the food marketers’ handbook.

In a USDA Children’s Nutrition Research Center study involving more than 10,000 sixth, seventh and eighth graders, marketing research strategies commonly used by food companies to sell snacks like soda and chips are being used to make school snack bar offerings healthier and increase students’ consumption of fruits and vegetables.

“Figuring out how to get kids to buy healthy foods like fruits and vegetables with their lunch money is as much a marketing challenge as it is a health issue,” said Karen Cullen, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor.

According to Cullen, kids’ consumption of fruits and vegetables slides significantly between elementary and middle school, a time when they begin having access to middle school snack bars. Snack bars, favored for their convenience, tend to offer foods like pizza, burgers, fries and chips -- but no fruit or low-fat vegetables.

“The experience of food service managers is that kids won’t buy fruits or low-fat vegetables at the snack bar,” she said. “We wanted to see whether we could change that.”

Cullen’s team put on their “marketing caps” to kick off the study. Their goal: learn what middle school students -- their "target market" --- thought about their eating preferences.

“A basic tenet of marketing is the need to understand your customer,” she said. “We needed to hear from students what fruits and vegetables they liked and what they thought they would buy -- and why.”

Through focus groups and written surveys, the team garnered important marketing insights, such as kids who liked apples and oranges wouldn’t buy a whole piece of fruit because it was hard to eat or messy. On the other hand, apple slices with a caramel dip got enthusiastic approval.

Armed with such knowledge, Cullen’s team crafted and launched a two-pronged marketing plan.

First, the team worked with food service managers to develop healthy kid-friendly “products” like salad “shakers,” veggie and dip “grab bags”, and bananas with a side of chocolate dip that could be offered at snack bars.

Then they launched an advertising campaign, consisting of poster “ads” and table tents.

“Our poster ‘ad campaign’ connected eating the new snack bar fruit and vegetable ‘products’ with the things that kids told us they want most, like friends, being cool and having fun,” Cullen said. “These are the same feelings that snack food companies play into so effectively with ads for high fat/high sugar foods aimed at kids.”

“Marketing is used to sell everything from shoes to sodas to kids. Why shouldn’t it be used to sell healthy foods at school snack bars, too?” she said.

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