THE JUNK FOOD PUSHERS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 26

Bailey and Sarasin have initiated a GMA-FMI Trading Partner Alliance that will align their agenda.
Each year the alliance plans to hold two meetings to target common goals and coordinate cost-cutting prac-
tices and sales optimization. 5
An example of how manufacturers and stores coordinate are the meetings Kraft had over an eighteen-
month period with Safeway. One of the problems they tackled was keeping Kraft's sugar-laden Capri Sun
lemonade stocked and sales moving, since the product is sold from a floor pallet. The team developed an
attractive stacking design that made stocking easy and resulted in a 162 percent increase in sales. 6
GMA and FMI have also launched a devious campaign for a voluntary front-of-package labeling system
that is likely to further confuse and confound consumers by providing incomplete information and nutrient
facts that give a false impression of the healthfulness of a food. It is a marketing ploy rather than an honest
labeling system. The campaign is designed to derail new federal labeling requirements. Marion Nestle, the
well-known nutrition professor and food writer, reports that she listened in on the GMA and FMI telecon-
ference call announcing the label, including the part where the trade association representative said they
were “singing 'Kumbaya'” about the label. They called it a “monumental, historic effort” in which food
companies “stepped up to the plate in a big way . . . with 100 percent support.” 7
Nestle contends that the goal of the industry effort is “to preempt the FDA's front-of-package food-la-
beling initiatives that might make food companies reveal more about the 'negatives' in processed foods.” 8
The industry is unified in opposing the use of traffic-light symbols—for instance, a red label indicating an
unhealthy food.
Unfortunately, the new industry label is merely an abbreviated version of the already required Nutrition
Facts label that is on the back of packages; it does not provide additional information or context. For in-
stance, there is no indication that saturated fat can cause heart disease or that sodium is dangerous for
people with high blood pressure. The label does not specify if it is desirable to have a high or low number
of milligrams or grams of a specified ingredient, and most Americans are not familiar with the metric sys-
tem used to measure these substances.
Although the industry claims that its Facts Up Front label is easy to use and will address obesity, most
Americans have little knowledge about the daily requirements for the different components of food, includ-
ing the number of calories they need to maintain their weight. It is unlikely that just indicating the number
in a serving will help consumers cut back on their total intake.
The International Food Information Council Foundation's 2008 Food & Health Survey: Consumer At-
titudes toward Food, Nutrition , & Health documented that “only 15 percent [of Americans] correctly es-
timated the recommended number of calories per day for a person their age, height, physical activity, and
weight.” 9
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a longtime advocate of informative labeling, rebuked GMA and FMI
in a January 24, 2011, press statement about the failures of the label: “Given that negative and positive
nutrients will not be differentiated on the package, there is significant risk that these labels will be ignored.
An adequate labeling system must clearly alert consumers about potentially unhealthy foods, and should
not mislead them into believing that some foods are healthy when they clearly are not.” 10