The year of free range

2011 will be seen as a watershed year for the acceptance of “free range” meat and animal products in Australia. Put simply, more people are becoming interested in the origins of what they’re eating and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon, offering “free range” choices to their customers.

This curiosity around provenance has helped lift at least part of the veil hanging over animal production and processing. And when people look inside, they don’t like what they see. An industrial food system is incompatible with animal welfare and people are switching to free range or more ethical options.

Hence, Red Rooster and KFC now offer free range chicken burgers. Domino's, a free range chicken pizza. Hungry Jack's, an organic beef burger. And both Coles and Woolworths have been expanding their lines of free range meat options.

All are excellent moves by these companies. The more Australians vote with their wallets and support this growing industry the better for free range producers and the lives of their animals.

But there is a challenge – the authentic standards of what constitutes free range must be adhered to. Conventional growers, processors and industry groups, knowing that their markets are threatened, have already attempted to water down definitions. This has to be resisted, by both the public and brand owners. Any dilution of free range standards will discredit the entire movement and make the term meaningless (which, of course, is the exact objective of groups threatened by the growth of this market).

Thus it’s vital for the brands who offer free range meat or animal product options to their customers to be completely transparent about where the product comes from and how it was raised. Transparency is the key to gaining and sustaining consumer trust in the growing market of free range products. It is transparency that will help the market for free range products grow even larger in 2012 and beyond.

The price of local

Buy local has become a catch-cry amongst many food advocates for a variety of reasons. Some dislike the sometimes larger “carbon footprint” that imported food generates. Others want to promote Australian producers and Australian made products as a means of supporting local industry. And for some, local just means fresher and better, a means of putting wealth back into their community.

But for all the talk, what action is there in the real world of the Australian consumer? A recent survey by Datamonitor provides disheartening news. According to Datamonitor, while two-thirds of Australian consumers say they believe it is important for grocery products to be sourced locally, “only 33 percent claim to buy local food and drinks regularly.”

Why is there such a huge gap between what consumers say and their actions? Datamonitor gives two reasons. First is price – 41% of Australians say that higher prices “are a major drawback of local offerings”, with 42% of Australians saying that finding a “lower price is more important to them than a product being produced locally.” Second is confusion. The “vague meaning” of “locally produced” is cited by 40% of Australians as an obstacle to buying locally produced products.

On numerous occasions we have cited confusion around the definitions of Country of Origin Labelling as a major challenge for local producers, brands and consumers. Until the mess of standards and labelling laws are resolved, we can expect this consumer confusion to continue. The ubiquitous Made in Australia from local and imported ingredients, while genuine for some producers, is used as a means of obfuscating the provenance of ingredients by many others. It’s no wonder consumers don’t have a clue on CoOL rules. It’s difficult enough for someone in the food industry to understand the regulations, let alone ordinary consumers.

On the subject of price however, the Datamonitor survey has uncovered a fascinating insight. Price is probably the main reason why many Australians don’t support local producers. But why do consumers think this way? One answer – blame the supermarkets. Over the last few years, price has played an increasingly important role in supermarket advertising and communications. Today, it’s impossible to have a television playing for five minutes without being reminded that prices are down down down, or are being knocked down, or are permanently down, because one can undertake “smarter shopping.”

This obsession with price has naturally transferred itself to the consciousness of consumers. They are being told that low prices on groceries are the only way to go. So they expect to see low prices on the supermarket shelves.

With the entire ecosystem becoming focused on price – the consumer, the supermarket buyer and therefore the producer or manufacturer, it’s no wonder that food imports are used wherever possible. The reality is that it is cheaper to produce food in China, or Thailand, or Africa, than it is in Australia. Low cost labour with little food safety laws or regulations trumps the Australian environment of high cost labour with strong food safety laws and regulations. The latter is of course better for the country and the consumer but it ends up costing more. Guess who ends up losing.

Until supermarkets make a concerted effort to champion authentic Australian producers and concentrate their advertising on the true meaning of “value” – supporting local communities and Australian-owned and managed producers and manufacturers – we can expect consumers to continue to think that cheap is good. Prices being constantly down down down is not a sustainable situation for anyone who is interested in the long term health of Australian food producers. Buying local comes at a price and thanks to the barrage of advertising, many consumers are just not wanting to make that sacrifice.

Perpetuating myths

When does an industry know that the tide of public opinion is turning against it? When it starts running an ad campaign dispelling the “myths” surrounding the industry. So it’s no surprise that Steggles, a large Australian poultry processor, has just commenced its own “myth-busting” campaign regarding factory farming chicken operations.

Developed with M&C Saatchi, Steggles makes the point that no broiler chicken is ever kept in a cage. No, that’s the lot of those unfortunate battery hens. Steggles chickens are kept in “big barns”. Watch the TV ad and one is positively amazed by the space that these chickens have to roam in. But as many people now know, the reality is somewhat different. Bottom line, most conventional chicken barns are factory farming at its finest with an average of 23 birds per square metre. Big barns they are – big barns crammed full of chickens (for a no-holds barred description of a chicken’s life on a factory farm, read this).

With more consumers turning to free-range and organic chickens, this ad campaign is an attempt by Steggles to whitewash their industry practices. Disingenuous in its approach, the campaign’s impact will most probably be minimal. For the ever-increasing numbers of consumers who care where their food has come from and how it was produced, the truth behind factory farming will take more than just words and well art-directed images to dispel.

Recent stories of note

After a long hiatus from Food & Beverage Marketing, we’re pleased to say that we’re back and will commence more regular updates on the blog from here on out. 

Rather than go through our recent reading post by post, here are a selection of links to some of the more interesting stories and issues in the world of food.

January saw a major announcement from Wal-Mart who are implementing a five-year plan to make thousands of their packaged foods lower in “unhealthy” salts, fats and sugars. Included in the plan will be a price drop on fruits and vegetables. It’s a laudable move on Wal-Mart’s part and serves as a further signal to Big Food and their brands that times are changing.

In February, the SMH’s John van Tiggelen wrote an excellent piece on Coles’ decision to switch to “hormone free” beef, examining the issues around hormones, feedlots and the spin behind major announcements. The upshot? It’s a great move but there are larger issues to be tackled, most notably, that most of the beef Australians now eat comes from grain-fed cattle. That is probably an even larger issue – expect the grain versus grass-fed debate to become more pronounced over the years ahead (grass-fed is always best and the growth of the CAFO production mentality in Australia is one of the great untold stories of agriculture in this country). And in a somewhat pathetic move following Coles’ announcement, a collection of “36 scientists” banded together and criticised Coles’ move. Alas the fact that their campaign was funded by the Animal Health Alliance, which represents the pharma companies that promote growth hormones, did nothing for their arguments or credibility.

In March, both Coles and Woolworths announced different sustainable fish sourcing strategies, Coles working with the WWF and Woolworths with the MSC. Both announcements were big on talk and scant on details. We’re looking forward to more concrete evidence that the supermarket chains are taking real steps to removing unsustainably sourced fish from their shelves. Our continued plundering of the rapidly depleting oceans is set to become the next big consumer issue over the next decade. Leadership in this field will reap benefits (as it has for UK supermarkets that are leading the sustainable fish sourcing trend).

And in April, there was great news out of the UK and a rather odd response from this country. The best before dates on food products will be removed in the UK and an estimated 8.3 million tonnes of food will be saved by this move every year. But, reported the SMH, “the executive officer of the Food Safety Information Council in Australia, Juliana Madden, said better education was the answer to overcoming Australians throwing away $5 billion worth of food each year.” Unfortunately however, better education will not only cost millions, it will also be ignored consumers, who see no difference between “best-before” or “use-by” dates. And it doesn’t’ solve the problem that some food companies purposefully use short best-before dates to encourage rapid turnover and consumption of their products. Education is an expensive answer to a problem with an easy solution – removing best before all together. If the Brits get it, why don’t we?

Grown in Australia, well, mostly…

As part of the new Australian Consumer Law, introduced on 1^st January 2011, there is now a provision for producers and manufacturers to use a label called “Grown in”. At first glance, this seems like a positive way of differentiating Australian grown ingredients and produce. But, as with most food labelling, looks are deceptive.

As it turns out, according to the ACCC, one can use the Grown in Australia label so long as “50 per cent or more of the total weight of the goods is comprised of ingredients or components that were grown and processed only in the specified country”.  

An example given on the ACCC website confirms exactly what this means:

Peas Grown in Australia—claim on a packet of snap frozen minted peas where the peas were germinated and harvested and packaged in Australia but where the mint was grown in China and imported into Australia for packaging with the peas. The peas are deemed to be the significant ingredient and 75 per cent of the ingoing weight of the final packaged good comprises of the peas.

So your peas can have mint from China yet be labelled as Grown in Australia. Mixed frozen vegetables, berries or processed foods could have ingredient inputs from other countries too but, so long as at least 50% or more were grown in Australia, the packaging would read: Grown in Australia.

This is yet another example of misleading country of origin claims. Most people will not think about ratios of ingredient inputs when they read a “Grown in Australia” label. They will just automatically assume that the product is 100% Australian.

The Minister of Innovation, Senator Kim Carr, says that “the new rules will help consumers to buy Australian produce with confidence”. When used properly, for fresh fruit and vegetables for example, the Grown in label will do just that. But Big Food hardly has a good track record when it comes to being honest and transparent with their country of origin labelling. Expect those packets of minted frozen peas, with the mint proudly grown in China, to have a Grown in Australia label very soon.

Update on Saturday, February 5, 2011 by Ben Dutton

The Australian Made, Australian Grown (AMAG) organisation got in touch about their own labelling standards vis a vis the Australian Consumer Law. Unlike the ACL, AMAG regulations dictate that a minimum of 90 per cent (by total weight) of a product's ingredients must be grown in Australia in order for that product to use the Australian Grown logo.

As they are ensuring that the majority of ingredient inputs are grown in Australia, the AMAG are using a sensible benchmark that allows for the usage of ingredient inputs that may not be produced in large enough quantities in this country (cocoa or vanilla, for example). The end result is that consumers can better trust the AMAG's logos over government regulations, a somewhat disturbing situation for producers who are facing ever increasing competition from cheap overseas imports. 

Congrats to the AMAG for standing their ground on this matter, their press releases on the subject can be read here.