On Food Choices
We have traded away biological diversity in exchange for brand diversity.
Walking down the aisles of even a modestly sized American grocery store is a stark reminder that we are swimming in food choices. The average number of items in an American grocery store hovers around 40,000, give or take 10,000 SKUs. It’s become an expectation and defining characteristic of first world Western societies to have ample choices and it’s hard to eliminate choices once we’ve been accustomed to having them.
One of the men responsible for the explosion of food product choices we have today is Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist and market researcher who worked closely with Big Food from the 1980s to early 2000s. Moskowitz’s most infamous achievement, masterfully described by Malcolm Gladwell in a 2004 TED Talk, was introducing extra chunky spaghetti sauce while working as a consultant to Campbell’s on their Prego sauce brand in the ‘80s.
Instead of trying to create the one perfect pasta sauce that would please everyone, Moskowitz determined that adding more flavor variants would better meet the needs of a wider range of eaters. It was a fool’s errand to try and get the chunky sauce people to agree with the smooth sauce people on the ideal sauce, so why not just make a separate kind of sauce for each person? Prego launched the extra chunky sauce and it was a hit. This example seems quaint and obvious to us today, but his groundbreaking work 40 years ago was the first step that led to the extreme customer segmentation and seemingly endless varieties of food product choices we have today.
Just one year later at TED, psychologist Barry Schwartz delivered a speech on the paradox of choice, arguing that the abundance of choice in our modern lives was not making us feel more free and happy, but more paralyzed and unhappy. More choices made people miserable because there was a higher incidence of regret after making a product decision, even if it was a good one.
Knowing that there are many other choices out there gave people a sense of missed opportunity, as any real or perceived flaw in a person’s choice could have been avoided if they had chosen one of the many other available choices. This leads to self-blame, because if someone isn’t happy with a product they chose, it isn’t the fault of the manufacturer, it was the fault of the consumer who simply chose the “wrong” product. Contrast this to the old days when there was just one choice of something and if people were unhappy with it, they could direct their anger to the producer of that thing, rather than self-flagellating and wallowing in their own poor decision.
Is More Choice Good for Us?
Fast forward to today, where we still live in a world of abundant choices. The legacy of Howard Moskowitz and his extra chunky sauce lives on in almost every grocery category from breakfast cereals, to nutrition bars, to bottled water. Are we better off with all these choices? Yes and no.
On the positive side, more choice means more chances for people to find the food that more perfectly suits their tastes, nutritional needs, and dietary restrictions. As anyone with a difficult food allergy can tell you, seeing something made especially for their needs in a grocery store can send them into a state of unbridled ecstasy and delight. For foodies, this wealth of choice is a great thing too, as they can experience cuisines from far flung places, delivered to their doorstep at the push of a button.
If we are optimizing for personal pleasure only, this range of choices can be a good thing. Schwartz’s analysis on the paradox of choice was done in the early 2000s, before the Internet had become what it is today. Yes there are a deluge of choices, but we have personalization algorithms and search engines to help us manage those choices. Around 50% of American consumers do some or all of their grocery shopping online today, which makes it easier to search and filter through 100s of breakfast cereals to find the one that might be best for them.
For better or worse, we have become accustomed to only seeing what we want to see on the Internet, so many of Schwartz’s points about more choices leading to unhappiness are mitigated by online personalization and increasingly powerful search engines. E-commerce, with its fast and free returns, can virtually eliminate buyer’s remorse and even encourage people to have 12 pairs of shoes delivered to their home to determine the perfect pair and have the rejects easily returned at little or no cost. The media plays its part too, as an endless sea of listicles and influencers exist to recommend the “best” products for each and every one of us.
We are extremely fortunate as a wealthy society to have all these options. But from an ecological standpoint, this abundance of choice is largely an illusion. Take breakfast cereals. One can marvel at the seemingly endless variety of breakfast cereals as we stand in the grocery aisle in front of a wall of boxes. But if you look beyond the colorful graphics and cartoon characters, they’re all made with same handful of ingredients like enriched grains and sugar. It’s brand diversity, not agricultural diversity.
The Kind of Choice Matters
I recently wrote about the importance of diversifying our diets in order to support a more biodiverse agricultural system. But that kind of biological diversity is not necessarily the same as having brand diversity. If we are optimizing for planetary health, then having a huge amount of food choices is only beneficial if those foods come from an appropriate set of diverse crops. Having 100 breakfast cereals all made with the same monoculture wheat might be interesting for eaters, but the planet would be better off if those cereals were made from not only better wheat but other ingredients that grow synergistically with that wheat.
In an ideal world, the product lineups in a grocery store would line up with the kinds of diverse plants and animals that co-exist in various farming regions worldwide. But typically when a CPG food company creates a new product, they uncover some latent consumer need that may or may not correlate with environmental sustainability, then they bend the agricultural system to fit that consumer need. This is the Howard Moskowitz way.
So deciding whether more food choices is good or bad for the world is not the right question to consider. Instead, we need to focus on what kind of food choices are being offered. Ideally those choices would all serve the whims and needs of people but also reinforce a more sustainable, regenerative agricultural system while being viable products from a business standpoint. But that’s unfortunately not the world we live in today.
But what are the limits of free choice? Laws work because in theory, all people in a society have to abide by them. We draw the line on personal freedoms when certain actions that individuals perform infringe on the rights and well-being of others. And while it’s pretty clear cut that choosing to physically harm another human being is not an acceptable personal choice, what about someone’s choice to eat a climate-unfriendly diet?
There are some problems in the world that require collective action to solve, like climate change. Will we actually move the needle on solving climate change if only 10% of the planet eats a diet that’s carbon neutral? Freedom of choice empowers individuals, but it makes it difficult to get a critical mass to support a single cause. This problem is made even more difficult because there is still a large population of people who don’t actually think man-made climate change is real, so to them there’s no such thing as a climate-unfriendly diet. I don’t think its practical, possible or useful to enact laws to force people to eat a certain way, so the battle for making a more planet-friendly food system has to be mostly done by winning people’s hearts and minds. And in today’s world where we can all choose to only read and believe the information we want to read, it might be impossible going forward to get everyone to agree on anything, even things that are commonly accepted as objective truths.
We Need Cars, Not Horses
As we look to the future and the food choices available to eaters, the onus is largely on food producers to make sure there are good choices available that appease people, planet, palate, and profit. Big Food is fairly risk averse, so relying on consumer feedback and testing, like Howard Moskowitz did, continues to be the primary method to create new food products.
But for putting foods out into the market that support healthier planetary ecosystems, Big Food needs to take the lead and show people what delicious, climate-smart food looks like. The average mainstream eater doesn’t know enough about agriculture and climate science to express what they want in a consumer study, so no focus group with regular people is likely ever going to tell Big Food they want a cereal that sequesters carbon or promotes soil health.
The quote, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” comes to mind here, which is a line that’s been erroneously credited to Henry Ford for decades as an explanation for how and why he created the automobile. Even though Ford never actually said that, it’s a completely valid point that requires bravery and brilliance to abide by. Big Food isn’t creating cars, it’s creating faster horses in the form of more and more hard seltzers, flaming hot snacks, and pseudo-scientific functional foods.
Big Food needs to muster the courage to put more things out there that aren’t just a part of some pre-existing food trend. They have the relationships with farmers, agronomists, and environmentalists to create that product that’s better for people and planet and make sure the next 100 breakfast cereals on the market aren’t just mindless remixes of the same 5 ingredients. Otherwise, the grocery store will continue to be a place that provides us with so many choices, yet so little purpose.
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Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
Liquid Death is a mind-set. And also just canned water. by Karen Heller - The Washington Post
The ugly story of how corporate America convinced us to spend so much on water by Emily Stewart - Vox
How T.G.I. Friday’s Helped Invent the Singles Bar by Nicola Twilley - The New Yorker
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.
This is an interesting piece, Mike. In marketing, there's a principle that too many choices is bad, and as a business owner, I've lived this first-hand.
I tend to agree about educating the consumer as being the key to success in navigating away from the ridiculous offerings... after all, the reason they're selling 40,000 products or whatever is simple: because we're buying. Still, this is a complicated and VERY big problem to try to solve. I agree that the onus is on convincing the public since meaningful legislation will remain unpopular until people are demanding fewer "choices" that aren't really choices.
You give the reader a lot to think about.