Revolution Foods: a healthier competitor to Lunchables

Marc Gunther
12 March 2014
theguardian.com

A California company offers a low-fat, low-salt and low-sugar alternative to Kraft’s Lunchables. Will it push the food giant to improve the nutrition of its boxed lunches too?
Back in the 1980s, health-conscious shoppers began to shy away from processed meat because of worries about fat and salt. Executives at Oscar Mayer, facing declining bologna sales, could have sought healthier alternatives. Instead, they invented Lunchables, the packaged, refrigerated, convenient meal in a box.
Kids loved them – they found it fun to assemble the crackers, bologna and cheese – and so did harried parents. But food critics were, and still are, appalled by the fat, sugar and salt packed into Lunchables’ familiar yellow packages.
Today, Lunchables is a $1bn brand with a persistent image problem – and it’s facing a new competitor aimed at health-conscious parents.
The new arrival is Revolution Foods, a small company based in Oakland, California, that has already enjoyed success delivering healthier meals for kids to schools. Last fall, Revolution Foods introduced packaged Meal Kits. They can now be found in more than 1,000 stores, including Safeway, Target, King Sooper’s (a unit of Krogers) and Whole Foods.
Will Kraft Foods, Oscar Mayer’s parent company, respond with better-for-you versions of Lunchables, or will the company stand pat and risk further damage to its reputation?
No one expects Revolution’s Meal Kits to topple Lunchables. But competition from the mission-driven upstart could add to pressure on Kraft to improve the nutritional profile of Lunchables, a process that is well underway.
“We are working to further reduce sodium, fat and calories at every opportunity,” Syd Lindner, a Kraft spokesman, told me by email. But, she added, “We can’t compromise on food safety and consumers won’t compromise on taste.” When Kraft substituted yogurt for candy – and added fruit juice – in a line of Lunchables in the early 2000s, sales were weak.
As Geoffrey Bible, the former CEO of Philip Morris, which once owned Kraft, argued to Michael Moss, the author of the 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us: “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt.’ Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their heads to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
Of course, Kraft and other big food companies helped create and exploit those cravings, as Moss documents in his excellent book. (A chapter is devoted to the creation of Lunchables.) Over the years, Kraft has expanded the Lunchables brand every which way. These days, they come in dozens of varieties, including, among other things, hot dogs, burgers, nachos, pizza, chicken dunks (don’t ask), smoothies, fruit cups and such familiar brands as Pringles, Kool-Aid, Capri Sun, Oreo cookies, Hershey’s Kisses, Rice Krispies treats and Starburst candy. With ingredient lists that go on forever, the vast majority of Lunchables violate guidelines for advertising food to children adopted by the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, in which Kraft participates.
By contrast, Revolution Foods’ Meal Kits have fewer ingredients and “no artificial anything”, the company claims. “They are made with real meat, real cheese and recognizable ingredients,” said Kirsten Tobey, the co-founder and CEO of Revolution. The company’s meat contain no antibiotics and comes from animals that have been humanely raised, she added.
On average, Revolution Foods’ Meal Kits are also lower in fat, salt and sugar than Lunchables. Revolution’s top seller, a Turkey-and-Cheddar Meal Kit, has 260 calories, 11 grams of fat, 440 mg of salt and 13 grams of sugar. Lunchables Turkey-and-Cheddar Flatbread Sandwich is more or less comparable, with 320 calories, 9 grams of fat, 580 mg of salt and 24 grams of sugar. But Lunchables Turkey-and-American Sandwich has 500 calories, 16 grams of fat, 1,070 grams of salt (45% of the recommended daily intake) and 27 grams of sugar. These numbers come from Good Guide. (Lunchables does not post its nutrition labels or ingredients on its website.)
Kraft’s Lindner says that the company has increased nutrients such as calcium, protein and Vitamin C in Lunchables while reducing sodium by 25%, fat by 20% and calories by 14% in the last decade. She also told me that people who eat Lunchables (about 25% are consumed by adults) do so “as an occasional treat”; on average, households that buy Lunchables do so once a month. That said, Kraft does everything it can to persuade people to buy them more often – and, remember, the product was created to reverse the declining sales of bologna, caused largely by health concerns.
Margo Wootan, the director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says Kraft deserves credit for introducing healthier alternatives – some Lunchables now come with smoothies – and for reformulating much of its line. But, she says, the company could do even better by using whole grains or substituting applesauce or packaged fruit for candy. “So few Lunchables are healthy,” she says.
Nor does Wootan buy the claim that Kraft and other big food companies are merely responding to consumer preferences. “I am so tired of companies claiming that they only sell junk food because that’s what consumers want,” Wootan told me. “I know that healthy food can taste great.”
Of course, consumers do play a big role here, too. No one, after all, needs Lunchables or, for that matter, Revolution’s Meal Kits. Sure, they’re convenient, but how hard is it, really, to pack a sandwich and a piece of fruit into a lunchbox – or to teach a child to do so? That’s what parents did before Lunchables came along. Sometimes progress towards a more sustainable food system can mean looking back to the past.