Slimming down

“I WILL miss treating my ear infections with the Buffalo Ranch McChicken,” quipped Jon Stewart recently on “The Daily Show”. After sending up McDonald’s announcement that it would phase out its use of chicken that had been fed with antibiotics, the television satirist lampooned a decision by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to let Kraft put the academy’s “Kids Eat Right” logo on its Singles slices, a “prepared cheese product”. That decision was reversed days later.

After decades of rising sales and high popularity, makers and sellers of processed food are under pressure not just from comedians but from policymakers, campaigners for “real” food and an increasingly sceptical public. In February Michelle Obama said she had long banned processed food from the presidential family’s table, in particular Kraft’s macaroni and cheese, one of its biggest sellers. Last month the company said it would remove the artificial colouring that gives the product its neon-orange glow. On April 28th it announced flat sales and a 16% fall in net profits, year on year, in the first quarter. McDonald’s, having replaced its boss in March because of poor sales, said on April 22nd that they were still falling.

Just as restaurants promising more “natural” ingredients have been winning customers from McDonald’s in recent years, Kraft and other American processed-food makers have lost out to smaller food firms peddling healthier fare. At the same time, consumers who are less choosy about ingredients have become more picky on price, switching to supermarkets’ own-label foods (see chart). Some big food firms are cutting back. In January General Mills, maker of Pillsbury chocolate-chip cookies and Totino’s frozen pizza, among other things, announced factory closures and job cuts. PepsiCo has just finished a three-year process to cut up to 8,700 jobs, or 3% of its global workforce.

Americans’ growing interest in healthier, simpler fare is providing opportunities for all sorts of startups. Family farms had been going out of business for decades, but now new ones are being founded, promising organic, locally grown produce. Kind, which makes fruit and nut snacks, has gone from nothing to annual sales of more than $100m in ten years. Even more impressively, Chobani, a maker of Greek-style yogurt, has gone from nowhere to sales of $1.3 billion in the same period.

One way in which the processed-food giants are reacting is by reformulating their products to answer worries about synthetic ingredients. Just as Kraft is promising with its macaroni, so Nestlé, the world’s biggest food firm, is pledging to remove all artificial flavours and colours in more than 250 types of chocolate sold in America. More recently PepsiCo said it would remove aspartame, an artificial sweetener, from Diet Pepsi sold in America. Its arch-rival Coca-Cola is promoting Coke Life, a fizzy drink that contains stevia, a natural, no-calorie sugar substitute.

But this strategy is not without risks. Stevia has a slightly bitter aftertaste that may put off some drinkers. And in 2010, when Campbell’s reduced the salt in its soup, customers rebelled, forcing it to add some back. Its soups’ market share in America continued to fall.

An increasingly popular, albeit expensive, alternative for the food giants has been to buy small but fast-growing healthy-food brands. In 2012 Campbell’s bought Bolthouse Farms, which makes organic juices; a year later it took over Plum Organics, a maker of baby food. In 2013 Coca-Cola bought Innocent, a maker of fruit smoothies. Last year General Mills bought Annie’s, an organic-food firm.

If the decline in processed foods’ popularity continues, two further strategies—consolidation and cost-cutting—will become more prevalent. Since they bought Heinz for $28 billion in 2013, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, an investment firm with Brazilian roots, have swung the axe at its head office and factories. Last year, although Heinz’s sales fell by nearly 5%, its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) rose by almost 35%.

In March Mr Buffett and 3G announced that they were buying Kraft for $50 billion to merge it with Heinz. Although the talk in public is about the potential for boosting the sales of both firms’ brands, there will surely be a drive to apply the same “zero-based budgeting” approach to cost-cutting at Kraft that Heinz has undergone. Mondelez, a snacks-maker spun off from Kraft, has also gone for zero-based budgeting: this week it announced improved operating-profit margins, year-on-year, in its first quarter, despite a 10% fall in revenues.

Mr Buffett and 3G are unlikely to be satisfied with just Heinz and Kraft, reckons Robert Moskow, a food-industry analyst at Credit Suisse: “I think they will keep consolidating the industry.” Heinz and 3G say they are planning to cut the debt on their balance-sheet to three times EBITDA in two years. At that point they will be ready to pounce on their next target. Last month Nestlé’s chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, told his shareholders that the two investors have “pulverised the food-industry market, particularly in America, with serial acquisitions,” and that their ruthless cost-cutting is having a “revolutionary impact” on other firms in the industry.

They are not the only ones showing how much scope there is for trimming financial fat as well as the culinary sort from the processed-food business. Two years ago Dean Metropoulos and Andy Jhawar, two entrepreneurs, bought Hostess, the collapsed maker of Twinkies cakes. They got rid of inefficient factories and pumped investment into automated production and an improved distribution system. Now Americans are stuffing their faces with the gooey snacks once more.

Hostility from regulators, campaigners and the media; declining popularity; consolidation and cost-cutting. Processed food sounds like it has much to learn from tobacco, an industry that has been shrinking for more than 50 years. “It won’t be as bad as tobacco, but a bumpy road lies ahead for Big Food,” predicts Alexia Howard of Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm. As the cigarette-makers have consolidated and cut costs, they have managed to keep profits up and share prices rising. Processed food may also become a steadily declining but still lucrative business offering guilty pleasures to those who cannot resist.