Giving Compass' Take:

• In response to consumers wanting to eat only 'clean foods' that have 'clean labels', food companies end up limiting ingredients. However, this phenomenon is only catering to fear and bias about what 'bad food' is. 

• How can food companies erase fears and bias about food without shrinking ingredient list? How can companies work harder to change perspectives around calories and nutrition?

• Read about this nutrition website that connects young adults to healthy eating habits. 

In January 2016, kids peering into their bowls of Trix cereal at breakfast found that the thrill was gone. The bright colors—lemony yellows, orangey oranges, and grapity grapes—had been replaced with more autumnal, somber hues. Instead of synthetic dyes, General Mills’ famous spheroids of puffed corn had been tinted with turmeric, carrot extracts, radish juice, and other natural colors. “Lime green” and “wildberry blue,” intensely neon shades the company’s scientists could find no natural ways to duplicate, had vanished entirely.

The resulting bowl looked drab and dull. But in theory, the change—which included swapping out high- fructose corn syrup for plain old sugar and corn syrup, and using only “natural flavors”—was a response to customer demand. “We’re simply listening to consumers and these ingredients are not what they’re looking for in their cereal today,” said Jim Murphy, president of General Mills’ cereal division, ahead of the launch. But the makeover met with harsh backlash, especially online. (“It’s basically a salad now,” one disgruntled lawyer whined.) By October 2017, all “six fruity colors” were back on shelves as “Classic Trix,” though the reformulated version continues to be sold.

On the surface, this may seem like the unprocessing of processed food. But the incredible shrinking ingredient list is a much stranger phenomenon than it at first appears. It’s more about optics than it is about health. It’s more about language than it is about specific ingredients. And it’s more about catering to a culture’s fears and biases than the genuine pursuit of better-for-you food.

Today, “healthy” snack sales are booming as the public becomes more additive-averse, scrutinizing labels with a suspicion that borders on indiscriminate chemophobia. Google nearly any food chemical, and you’ll find reasons to fear.

Read the full article on food labeling by Nadia Berenstein at The New Food Economy