Throughout the world, there are millions of overweight consumers putting themselves at risk of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes due to poor eating habits. Consumer watchdogs know it, government know it, and the food companies know it.
Arab consumers might know it, too. The problem, marketers say, is that they don't seem to care. At last month’s seventh annual Food Marketing Forum in Dubai, industry experts addressed the regional health situation. All those present, from global food giants like Kraft to small regional start-ups like Saudi-based quick-service restaurant From Nature, agreed on one thing: GCC consumers are facing serious health issues because of their eating habits and predominantly sedentary lifestyles.
In some GCC countries, up to 60 percent of men and up to 75 percent of women are overweight or obese, according to Dr. Abdulrahman Musaiger of the Bahrain Centre for Studies and Research. The main cause of this, he says, is inactivity. After that, it’s down to diet. High intakes of cholesterol, fat, sodium, sugary beverages and caffeine combine with low intakes of iron-rich food, fiber, fruits and vegetables to expand the region’s girths.
Marketers, he says, are partly responsible. In advertising that pushes fat-rich and carbohydrate-packed grub, in “all you can eat” restaurant promotions, and with aggressive giveaways or bargains in stores, food companies contribute to the public’s perception that unhealthy food is okay.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Unilever and Kraft, two of the biggest food manufacturers in the region, say they are making an effort to improve the health qualities of their products as part of their companies’ global initiatives.
Globally, Unilever has adopted “Vitality” as a corporate catchword in its bid to position itself as a company that helps consumers look and feel good. Unilever spends the majority of its €1 billion research and development budget on “vitality-driven innovation,” according to Jan-Piet van Kesteren, vice-president of food and beverage marketing for Unilever Arabia.
It’s a similar story for Kraft. “Most of our research and development work happens on a global scale,” says Vishal Tikku, Kraft’s director of marketing in the GCC. “Anything we make is very carefully evaluated from a health point of view, as the research centers are in the US, Europe and Southeast Asia, which are all markets where there’s a strong consumer trend towards health and wellness.”
Unfortunately, it’s a global trend that isn’t too evident in the Gulf region – particularly in the most important market, Saudi Arabia, which Tikku estimates is responsible for around 60 percent of food sales in the region.
In fact, some say it’s not just a lack of interest in healthier eating. Many consumers prove to be actively (well, actively may be an exaggeration, as they’re probably wedged into their sofas) resistant to the introduction of beneficial ingredients to – or removal of harmful ones from – their favorite dishes, for a number of reasons.
TASTE VS. HEALTH
“In Saudi these days, people are saying, ‘If it’s healthy, it’s not tasty,’” says Thamer Al Rumaih, general manager of Riyadh-based From Nature restaurant. “Basically, they’re confusing diet food and healthy food, so there’s a lot of misconceptions from the customer. They think healthy food is what you get in the hospital.”
Al Rumaih started his quick-service health food restaurant six months ago, serving sandwiches, salads and fruit juices. “While constructing our menu, our main focus was, ‘If you lose the taste, you lose the customer.’ So our food is delicious, but it’s also healthy. We don’t promise that you’ll lose weight, we promise that you won’t feel guilty after eating it. It’s a balanced diet. Every single thing in our sandwiches is directed to serve your body and we make that clear in the menu.”
The problem of providing healthier options without compromising taste is the major challenge facing food manufacturers today, Tikku explains. “There is no instance – not just in the GCC, but anywhere in the world – of consumers giving up significant amounts of taste for goodness or for health benefits,” he says. “You have to get to the point where they can be balanced.”
GCC nationals in particular are renowned for their sweet tooth. “Light” or “diet” products that sell well elsewhere in the world tend to bomb here, according to Tikku. “The fact of the matter is that there is almost no ‘light’ kind of product – with the exception perhaps of oils and dairy products – that has some kind of penetration with GCC national consumers,” he says. “Zero-sugar drinks, for example, just don’t sell. You can taste the aspartame sweetener and they don’t like it. So they don’t buy it. It’s as simple as that.”
Unilever’s Kesteren is more optimistic about his company’s ability to strike a balance between taste and health. “You can have both. Healthy food can be tasty food,” he says. He cites his company’s Knorr brand of soups as a successful example of a healthier product developed for the region. “We have several new products launched in the last few years as healthy alternatives, and they’re flying,” he says.
BIG IS BEST
But it’s not just taste buds that make it an uphill struggle to market healthy food. There are centuries of cultural conditioning to take into account. In the past, being skinny probably meant you were struggling for food rather than striving to look and feel good. A big stomach wasn’t a sign that you’d let yourself go; rather, it was a sign of success.
“Unlike in the West, people here aren’t that bothered about looking overweight,” Tikku says. “Traditionally, the people who weren’t thin and wiry were the prosperous ones. This was true in Western Europe until 50 or 60 years ago. The prosperous guy was the one with the belly and the suspenders holding his trousers up.”
Tikku also stresses that in the GCC, the shift from the traditional regional diet to today’s huge choice of cuisines has been dramatically quicker than anywhere else in the world.
“What has happened here in the last 20 years took centuries in a society like Japan, for example. It’s gone from being a rice-and-meat society to consuming pretty much everything that’s available on supermarket shelves,” he says. “It’s now driven by taste and [for most GCC nationals] there’s no problem with not being able to afford something, so there’s nothing to curb it. These things weren’t available before, and they’re really tasty, so everybody goes for them, with very little thought of the consequences.”
Regional mass media has also played a significant role in promoting “plumper” figures as aspirational role models, particularly among women, Tikku says. “Most of the real TV heroines are not thin. They’re buxom ladies with nice personalities. So a bit of weight is linked with success. And greater child-bearing capabilities too, which is important in this society.”
Rola Tassabehji, corporate communications manager for Unilever Middle East, says this is changing. “From the research we’ve done for our beauty products, Saudi women are very concerned about getting slimmer figures,” she says. “With the spread of satellite television and the Internet, the younger generation is very conscious of physical appearance, particularly body shape. A 2006 survey for Dove shows that Saudi women’s strongest wish for future generations is to learn to eat healthily.”
From Nature’s Al Rumaih also argues that the spread of new media such as the Internet and satellite TV means Saudi consumers are starting to change their perception of the body shape they aspire to. “I think it’s definitely changing. People are looking at media on a bigger scale,” he says. “Everyone watches Lost. Everyone watches Desperate Housewives. They’re popular series around here.”
THE YOUTH FACTOR
Another important factor for regional food marketers to consider when they try to push healthier products to GCC consumers is the fact that there are so many young people here. Many of the health issues that manufacturers are looking to address are simply ignored by a huge percentage of the population.
“They don’t really worry about health and obesity. When you’re young, you’re invincible,” Tikku says. “Most of these health issues are an accumulation of bad habits and don’t hit you until you’re in your 30s. You don’t think about cholesterol and diabetes – they’re old people’s problems. There’s much greater concern about skin care and things like that among girls than there is about health issues. Because that has a direct impact on what they look like. But much less on whether the heart is pumping OK.”
According to Peter Wennstrom, president of Health Focus Europe, there are six kinds of consumer when it comes to healthy eating. The prevalence of young people in the Middle East means there are a lot of “unmotivateds” in the region, who simply don’t see any link between food and health. Educating these consumers is imperative for food marketers if their healthy alternatives are to catch on here.
In one study by Kraft, 60 percent of clinically obese GCC consumers didn’t think they had a problem, Tikku says. “They said they were healthy. ‘I can move around fine, I’m not constrained, I’m not sick, I don’t have a disease. Where is the problem?’”
“These are new ideas for the region,” says Al Rumaih. “We need to educate people, to improve the understanding of what being fit is and of what healthy food is.”
LABEL LAWS
While everyone we speak to agrees that consumer education is a must if the region is to combat the health risks posed by a poor diet, they also say it’s not solely the manufacturers’ responsibility. “Governments must intervene,” says Wennstrom. “It’s much bigger than individual companies.”
Both Unilever and Kraft publish nutritional information on all their food products here, even though the law only requires a list of ingredients. But nutritional information is of little use if the consumer can’t interpret it, Tikku concedes. “It still suffers from the fact that most people don’t know what 550 kilocalories means, for example. You need a degree to sift through it and in the end you just give up,” he says. “There needs to be an industry-wide parameter where you say that, for example, your daily requirement of energy is 2,100 kilocalories and this is 25 percent of that. Something like that has to happen.”
In Europe, the industry got together and came up with its own labeling requirements – explaining the recommended daily intake of food contents and the percentage provided by the particular item being sold. There is no such initiative yet in this region.
And, says Tikku, manufacturers can only be expected to do so much. “We can’t change our products until they want us to change our products. Nobody’s in the business of going out of business, and that’s what’ll happen,” he says. “For things like diabetes, it really is up to the authorities to come up with a means of educating the consumer. The responsibility of the manufacturers is to inform. The concern has to be raised somewhere else. The manufacturer’s job is to be completely honest and transparent and say, ‘This is what this product contains. You eat it at your own risk.’”
MORE TEA?
Given the difficulties in convincing regional consumers to gorge on healthier options, marketing will be crucial to manufacturers’ future success or failure. Unilever is about to launch a regional PR push for its Lipton brand’s green tea, promoting the company’s claim that tea is “the second healthiest beverage on the planet,” according to Kesteren. “We need to close the gap between reality and perception,” he says. “To show people that you can have a healthy diet and still enjoy it.”
And if the younger generation doesn’t yet aspire to being lean, trim and fit, maybe advertising can convince them, says Shehzad Younes, chief creative officer of Pirana Advertising in Dubai. “I’m sick of seeing happy families sitting around dining tables eating together. That’s ridiculous,” he says. “I can’t think of any campaign that talks about health. Health over here is, ‘This is cholesterol-free, so your husband won’t die of a heart attack.’ That’s the best they’ve done. It’s aimed at over-40s. Young people don’t care, and they eat like crazy. You need to cover other aspects of health – ‘You’ll become fat and slow,’ ‘Being lean is good’ – not just heart disease and stuff.
“If the belief that slim is cool isn’t here, advertising can introduce it,” he continues. “It’s up to agencies. We need to wake them up and tell them that fat is not so cool. There’s no image that being slim and being in shape is cool. If people did a campaign showing a healthy, in-shape person in a very glamorous way, people who saw it would want to be that person.”
The key target if food marketers want to shift society’s perceptions, Wennstrom says, is always the mother. “Where is the mother in your market? That’s what you need to know,” he says. “Mothers aren’t worried about obesity. They’re worried about appetite. They want to make sure their child is eating.” If manufacturers can convince mothers that their child will happily eat healthily, then GCC waistlines may start shrinking.