By focusing on healthy food with higher margin. That could cause people to eat less and be thinner and food companies would keep their revenues because margin would be higher (think free range eggs, chicken that lived outside in good conditions instead of horrible food factories where they are treated horribly).
That happens a lot, specially in places selling healthy snacks.
I used to work for one of them at certain point and the secret sauce was mostly using tons sugar and/or salt to increase sales. Unless one puts a lot of effort (which can be quite expensive when running a business), healthy food doesn’t sell well.
> It seems everything that makes food more profitable also makes it less healthy.
There are two sides to this: it's cheaper to supply unhealthy food, but only when people buy it. Other brands (Whole Foods, Amy's frozen foods, arguably the entire "cooking show" industry) are built around fetishization of the healthy eating. This is why the recent ruling on displaying "added sugars" is so important, even if many more similar steps are necessary for people to make educated, healthy decisions when hungry. If we can convince corporations it is in their profit margins' interest to provide healthier food—ideally because consumers assign value to the nutritional content instead of just calories—we'll see widespread health benefits.
That said, you're completely correct, which is why there are systemic problems with the diets of the lower class. Why buy real food when you can feed yourself (or your kids, or your relatives) with cheaper food that is easy to eat? There's simply no reason for those brands to invest in cheaper, healthier food when it would be harder to sell and couldn't piggyback off shared food processing (e.g. processed sugars, grains, meats, proteins).
This is a well known problem. Healthy food is just too f-ing expensive.
If anyone is looking for a billion dollar idea, try making a healthy tasty affordable fast food chain. And no subway does not count, it tastes like cardboard.
The biggest problem with the healthy fast food chain is supply of fresh produce. One of the main reasons bad food is so much cheaper is simply because it lasts longer and thus can handle the long nationwide supply chains that are currently prevalent.
But that is the exact type of problem that should be solvable with present technology. You could connect all the small farmers in an area in some kind of online market and allow them to sell produce directly to restaurants at weekly or daily auctions or even sell contracts for future delivery of produce. Thus, the restaurants can have a way to get their supplies cheaply and reliably and directly from the farmer.
Not much money to be made in healthy foods, much more money to be made in processed foods and cancer drugs. I don't think there is some grand conspiracy and huge collusion. I just think the profit factor is so huge in giving people crap foods. Then there is tons of money to be made selling them exotic drugs. Healthy foods means someone cooks fresh vegetables a few minutes before you eat it, can't store that in a warehouse.
If you can figure out how to successfully market and sell "Eat less, eat quality" to American consumers while maintaining food supplier revenue growth, you'll solve a lot of problems.
My personal opinion is that we're so growth and value oriented - and that's fundamentally incompatible with a healthy diet.
Look at CostCo! They have an amazing amount of fresh, healthy meats and vegetables. But you're still walking out of that store with a twelve-pack of fish and the barrel of cheese puffs you saw on the way out. The majority of Americans simply lack the self control. The food production companies know this and take full advantage of it.
But not as great as unhealthy food. So if you're trying to sell food next door to someone selling tastier food, you're probably not going to succeed unless you have a weird number of health conscious folks. And health conscious folks tend to cook at home anyway and not eat out anyway.
Simply raising prices on bad food would not be enough. Food education and getting healthy food choices to be more affordable are key. There are huge swathes of people who have no clue what eating healthy looks like. And eating healthy is more expensive.
I disagree that there isn’t much demand for healthy food services. I think the real problem is that healthy food just doesn’t have as high of profit margins as unhealthy food.
A satisfying healthy meal will be primarily meat based, which is expensive.
A satisfying unhealthy meal will contain lots of carbs and fat, which is cheap.
Except that it'll inflate the price of the healthy foods in order to make up the costs of all the advertising they do on social media. Too many people struggle accessing and affording healthy foods as it is.
I’d go a step further and give people discounts if they even try to eat healthy. Amazing how long I can go shopping cart peeking without spotting a single vegetable or fruit.
In other news corporations feeding people garbage report billions in profits. Go to a supermarket, 90% of the food there is processed garbage. This is by design. We are not healthy because we are being fed our desires for profit, they create addictive food which is bad for you and costs nothing to produce because there is profit in it. Great success for all of humanity.
Sadly, vending machines are filled with mars bars and not celery stalks. Cities are overflowing with McDonalds' and Pizza Huts. You can stuff 2000kcal worth of fast food down your gob for under a tenner of whatever currency. But if you want a healthy salad, you'll be paying a premium. I feel like there's a business opportunity in healthy fast food, but as far as I can tell there's no such thing, at least not in any of the cities I've lived in.
What makes you think they'll buy more healthier food instead of just getting even more junk? That's like giving more heroin to a junky in hopes that'll he'll shoot up less.
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