Sausage-Making by Don Draper

Take a walk down the supermarket aisle with me.

That box of magically delicious, grrrrreat! frosted cocoa fiber antioxidant beta-blocker omega 3-6-9 (what comes after 9?) puff loops you just put into your basket was likely many years in the making.

Every day, at companies with big, friendly sounding names like General Mills, Kellogg, and Nestle are thousands of folks in white lab coats backed by billions-with-a-B! of dollars in research, spinning petri dishes and flicking their Bunsen burners in the name of nutrition.  And they are way ahead of you.  Sometimes the stuff they poke, burn, boil and prod comes from Iowa, other times it was delivered via a barefoot guy from the Assurini, Tapirajé, Kaiapó, Kapirapé, Rikbaktsa or Bororo tribe who paddled it down the Amazon in a dugout canoe.  Years, sometime decades, before you wheel into aisle 6, they’ve been working on your breakfast cereal.

Sitting on their shoulder are phalanxes of earnest folks, clip-boards at the ready, from FDA and the like.  Pinned to their wall no doubt is the latest federally-mandated food pyramid in all of its compromised, lobbied and negotiated-reality glory (I’m already out of my depth here, but this one – the Pyramid – we’ll get back around to, trust me).

The intentions of these scientists and nutritionists are, save for the random thumb-sucking/child porn-collecting/kitten-murderer in the lot (hey, every office has one), very likely noble.  Is this ingredient or food friend or foe?  Can it be be added to our existing product without altering the taste profile or losing its potency through processing?  What’s the costs and complexity associated with the supply and processing?

Then comes the big question: Will it sell?

Enter Don Draper.

It’s a cha-cha-cha of marketing, science, policy, business, and ethics that brings us back to the supermarket aisle or the counter of our favorite fast feeder.  The push-pull-glide of it all is fascinating and truly hiding in plain sight.  Don and the marketing guys have been shaping opinions for decades with jingles and buzz words.  It used to be fairly straight forward with the search for a “unique selling proposition” to differentiate a commodity like oats (Raise your hand if you old enough to remember Quaker selling oatmeal based on the clearly beneficial claim of it being “shot from cannons?”  Okay, trick question, you’d have to be dead, but it’s true). But the sophistication of customer research coupled with the command of mass media tipped the balance in such a way that myriad elements in the supply chain that impact profitability could now be manipulated.  So the question, “will it sell?” turns into the dictate, “this is what sells” and makes its way upstream.

Uh oh.

Gaming the market is nothing new and seems relatively innocent.  I mean, it’s not like they’re lacing cyanide into your Manwich (are they?).  But wait. Marketing guys and accountants and a growing army of sharpies lobbying for subsidies influence the things you put into your body, directly impacting your health.  For instance, work down stream from the Beef Industry’s unmitigated lobbying for corn subsidies (cheap feed that quickly fattens cattle while creating a need for a cocktail of antibiotics as corn is not a cow’s natural food).  Cheap corn creates all sorts of opportunities explaining the ubiquitous nature of high-fructose corn syrup which most agree has left its sticky finger prints all over the explosion of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, etc., creating an epidemic of human suffering and, not-so-by-the-way, exponential, unsustainable increases in healthcare.  That’s not the half of it.

I know – freaks me out too.

The point is, there are some slick forces at work in the food industry and they’ve had a good run, but the good news is that the tables are turning and maybe faster than slow.  It started in safe places in things like yogurt and on the bread aisle.   We’ve watched the choices of loaf bread multiply like taco trucks after an unprecedented-man-made-disaster-created-by-the-failure-of-federally-guaranteed/maintained-levees – from white Bunny Bread to a smattering of brown (Roman Meal) to a deluge of whole wheat and multi-grain options.  Sure it can be flat out paralyzing to choose a loaf for little Jenny’s PB&J, but at least now you can wander out of the highly-refined white bread desert.

Thanks to more readily and qualified access to nutritional information and to one another (mostly digitally enabled), we’re not so seduced by Draper and his Brylcreamed smirk.  Armed with better information and more control of the marketplace, we can now puncture the hype and more importantly, flag the dangers.   This has been led, not surprisingly, by women, who not only keep the checkbook, but who clue into science and actively discuss health within their network.

So marketing still figures – heavily. Now though, because there is so much daylight and so much ability to immediately vote with feet, wallets, and twitter, marketing has new obligations: service, utility, intelligence, sustainability and benevolence.  The tension will remain, but its a much healthier and more constructive detente.  Think carrots and sticks helping to nudge all that talent toward the design of information and processing it into useful, digestible chunks and iterative steps.  Balance substance and style with social benefit and true innovation.  Everyday, juiced by engaged markets and the crushing reality of being led off the cliff into a global recession by the corruption of capitalism, more businesses and people are coming to the conclusion that it’s never okay to hold your nose while you do your work.

It’s different.

Case in point, The Nutrition Business Journal just published it’s list of the key trends affecting the nutrition sector in 2010 (note that both probiotics and more importantly prebiotics — found in NakedPizza’s crust, along with a dozen whole grains and seeds — are discussed).  Back when it was perfectly acceptable to fire innocent oats from a cannon it’s unlikely anyone would have talked about nutrition trends, much less seen a published report about them.  Today, it beams its way around the globe to be discussed and debated, poked and prodded by folks in lab coats but also bus drivers and mortgage bankers. Sure, the lab coats and marketers have a head start but the process, information, and impacts, for good or bad, are more transparent.

So now we know more, sooner, with greater say in the process.  More control over our bodies, our health, and the well-being of ourselves and that of the people who we love and who depend on us.  Classic rights and responsibility.

Now that you know, now that you can, what will you do?