'Natural' food is big business; too bad it's meaningless

The largely unregulated word drives sales, but should businesses give it up? Food companies face pressure from a Consumer Reports campaign and class-action lawsuits

• Should companies should be able to use the word 'natural'?

According to Jennifer Harris, who studies food advertising: “The more claims there are on the front of the package, the less healthy the package.” Photograph: Murdo Macleod

If it’s natural, it must be good for you – or at least better than the alternative, right? That’s what the majority of shoppers assume when they see the word “natural” on the processed foods that fill supermarket shelves, which in turn is why food manufacturers use it liberally on their product packaging.

According to a survey released by Consumer Reports on 16 June, 60% of consumers look for the word “natural” on the foods they buy. Two thirds of those polled think it means that the product has no artificial ingredients, pesticides or genetically modified organisms – including artificial growth hormones, antibiotics or drugs in meat. And 80% think that the presence of “natural” on food packaging should mean those things.

The problem is that ”natural” means just about nothing, in terms of US food labelling regulations. Products marked “natural” aren't certified or inspected to ensure they are, and the legal definition is vague at best.

Citing the lack of a “single meaning to a significant number of consumers”, the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 declined to include the word “natural” (or “sustainable”) in its latest Green Guides, which set guidelines for green marketing claims. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) explicitly notesthat it has no definition for “natural”, allowing companies to use it if a product doesn’t contain “added color, artificial flavor, or synthetic substances”. And the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) gives a barebones definition – products must “contain no artificial ingredients” and be “minimally processed”.

“The fact of the matter is the majority of the market uses that label to insinuate they are doing something more than they actually are,” says Urvashi Rangan, executive director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Research Center, who led the research. To push for clarity on the issue, Consumer Reports is partnering with social action platform TakePart to petition FDA and USDA to ban the term’s use on food packaging.

Meanwhile, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a food industry trade group, contends that the current definition is sufficient. In response to a request for comment about the Consumer Reports survey, the group emailed:

“For the use of the claim ‘natural’ on a food label, GMA recommends that food and beverage manufacturers abide by FDA’s policy which stipulates that the claim ‘natural’ on food labels is truthful and not misleading when ‘nothing artificial or synthetic (including all colour additives regardless of source) has been included in, or has been added to, a food that would not normally be expected to be in the food.’”

Would banning “natural” give “organic a boost?

While past consumer advocacy efforts tried pushing the FDA to define and regulate “natural”, Rangan says, Consumer Reports has very deliberately chosen to advocate tossing it completely. Consumer expectations about “natural” overlap significantly with perceptions about the USDA's “organic” label, a regulatory framework that took a federal law and 12 years of rule-making to develop, she adds: “It’s not perfect, but it’s something we already have in place. We don’t feel like we need to reinvent the wheel.”

Still, a ban on the word is unlikely, experts say. The FDA has consistently declined past requests to define it, and tackling the issue is not high on the list of the agency’s priorities, says Kantha Shelke, a principal at food industry intelligence firm Corvus Blue and a spokesperson for the Institute of Food Technologists, a food industry trade group.

And “natural” is big business. According to the market research firm Nielsen, the food industry sells $40bn worth of food labelled with the word “natural” annually. An array of other labels, such as “low-fat” and “carb-conscious”, helped support a total $377bn in US sales last year.

“It’s an enormously powerful marketing tool,” says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “If the Consumer Reports survey did anything, it proved what everybody already knows – which is, if you don’t have these things on your packages, nobody will buy them.”

Nestle agrees with Consumer Reports and other advocacy groups that many companies use the term deceptively. Generally, according to Jennifer Harris, a professor of psychology at Yale University who studies food advertising: “The more claims there are on the front of the package, the less healthy the package.”

Misuse or just a misunderstanding?

Not everyone, though, agrees that the term is deceptive. Shelke of the Institute of Food Technologists concedes that the term is problematic, but traces the issue to differing perceptions rather than misuse.

“What industry means by the term and what consumers assume it means can be very much at a tangent,” she says, adding that misconceptions are due in part to the fact that consumers choose to embrace the “health halo” the word offers.

Rangan believes that government agencies are best positioned to take action, but says companies also could proactively take responsibility and just stop using the term themselves.

Some indicators suggest that the tide may already be shifting away from “natural”. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, 22.1% of new food products - and 34% of new beverage products - launched in the first half of 2013 made the claim, compared to 30.4% and 45.5%, respectively, in 2009.

That decline may be due in part to some 200 lawsuits that have been filed over the past few years around use of ”natural” on food products. Millions of dollars have been paid out by companies to settle these cases, and in many instances the word has been dropped from the packaging of contested products such as Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Naked juices and Frito-Lay chips.

Currently, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that has led such class-action litigation efforts, is suing General Mills over the use of “all natural” on its Nature Valley Chewy Trail Mix bars because they contain high-maltose corn syrup, a processed sweetener, and maltodextrin, another processed ingredient often used to add texture to foods.

General Mills declined to comment on this issue.

The case is still pending, but the company – along with others - has removed the phrase from the product's packaging, says Stephen Gardner, the center's director of litigation. 

“All the ‘natural’ litigation is going to have an effect on the marketplace,” Gardner says. “Companies don’t really want to be sued.