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Food Industry Chases Self Regulation

At a meeting yesterday between food executives, government officials, consumer advocates and academics to discuss marketing food to children, Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, introduced a bill that would lift the ban on the FTC’s regulating of advertising aimed at children, according to the New York Times. The bill has yet to get much support from Congress; government bans on certain types of marketing to children is neither “wise nor viable,” said FTC chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras.

 

Both the food industry and the government seem to agree that self-regulation is best for advertising to children. Existing attempts at self-regulation have so far resulted only in a five-person organization called the Children’s Advertising Review Board, or CARU. Harkin said the board has become the “poster child for how not to do self-regulation.”

But before yesterday’s meeting at the FTC offices, the Grocery Manufacturers Association had already announced a series of initiatives to increase nutrition education, particularly among students, teachers, and families. The GMA, whose member companies include The Campbell Soup Company, The Coca-Cola Company, Kellogg , and General Mills, has also called for an expansion of CARU’s staff and $650,000 budget.

Critics claim that, except for Kraft, which announced in January that it would only market to children those products that meet its nutritional guidelines for healthier choices, food companies have not done much to alter their marketing efforts to children. At the meeting, a Coca-Cola executive highlighted a physical education campaign for middle schools featuring Lance Armstrong, and a McDonald’s vp mentioned that the fast food chain now sells 300 million salads a year in the US.

The meeting followed a September 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine on preventing childhood obesity.