Only if it’s on the store shelf, says Dave Dzisiak. Which is a problem because big food companies react to trends, they don’t try to start them.

 

Health is a megatrend in U.S. food marketing, Dzisiak, global commercial leader for oils at Dow AgroSciences told the ABIC 2007 conference in Calgary on Wednesday.

 

That sounds like perfect for ag biotechnology, which can produce food ingredients with everything from healthier oil profiles to higher nutritional contents. Yet, at the same time, the U.S. has these two other megatrends at work too: convenience, and indulgence.

 

So the bottom line, said Dzisiak, is that agriculture is going to have to work within current food categories to improve their health profiles. It can’t expect consumers to switch overnight to new foods just because they’re healthy. Said Dzisiak: “People will not buy health if it doesn’t taste good.”

 

U.S. food giants are re-positioning their brands to take advantage of budding health markets that are expected to become massive within the next decade. Nestle’s, for instance, has budgeted $1.7 billion for research and development to help transition it into a wellness company. General Mills wants its brand to be perceived as a wellness brand too, and so does Kart, which has seen its new Sensible Solutions product line post two to three times the sales growth of other products.

 

Across the U.S., functional foods (foods that deliver benefits beyond daily nutrition) are ringing cash registers to the tune of $60 billion, Dzisiak said. By 2015, estimates of their sales range from $100 to as much as $500 billion.

 

Americans need that market to deliver, Dzisiak added. It’s only within the past century, he pointed out, that chronic diseases have overtaken infectious disease as the leading cause of U.S. deaths, even though chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes can be mitigated by managing their risk factors.

 

“Two-thirds of deaths are self-inflicted,” Dzisiak said.

 

Despite wide-ranging advances in scientific knowledge of how to reduce those deaths, however, Americans keep getting unhealthier. At current rates, 75 per cent of Americans will be overweight in 2015, and 41 per cent will be clinically obese. Already, one in 8 American children have two or more risk factors for heart disease, 10 per cent of teenagers have high cholesterol.

 

“We can help, but the challenge is, how can we transfer our technology into the market,” Dzisiak said. “It’s tough to get people to change the way they eat. What we need to do, is make what they eat healthier.”