nickshanagher

I am sure that FT columnist Michael Skapinker has written about traffic lights food labelling before and his latest article is provocatively called: The food companies that make people fat. He criticises Coca-Cola and Unilever for sticking with guideline daily amounts (GDAs) when traffic lights work much better. Former Walmart Europe public affairs head Bernard Hughes wrote in to support Skapinker. He said: "There isn't ever a perfect information system flowing with beautiful logic. But traffic lights give powerful direction to the busy consumer." But in this age of smart phones surely this debate over the labelling on the packaging is easily overcome. The government can simply issue an app that when held over a bar code provides shoppers with a traffic light system. The supermarkets could do this on their websites. Surely the whole point about the future is that the internet and limitless data storage means that the shopper is being empowered with the informatio...

My friend David Adams has been promoting The Fast Diet for some time. David is also the person who has tuned me in to thinking about gaining lightness rather than losing weight. And armed with the fast diet he has gained some fantastic lightness by fasting two days out of seven over the past half year. Now Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is promoting the same programme in the Guardian. What is interesting about his article is the context. "All my books and TV shows are largely complicit with [society's] disastrous approach to eating," he writes. "I like to think I am at the healthier, more natural end of the spectrum...but I think it would be unwise not to acknowledge that even the 'River Cottage diet' - rich as it ought to be in fresh vegetables and fruit - is open to abuse. "The fact is that even those of us who know exactly what a sensible...healthy diet looks like still struggle to keep to one much of the time. "The industrialisation of f...

Writing in the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, recounts how he took part in a television discussion about the links between obesity and poverty, when a fellow panelist said to him: "It's all right for you, shopping at Waitrose". Mr MacKenzie then defends his choice of supermarket by saying it is the nearest to where he lives and as "any food retailer will tell you - thanks to their extensive research - no customer wants to travel more than one and a quarter miles to shop. It's why supermarkets build more and more stores". If he is correct, then Waitrose must locate its shops where there are fewer obese people - and as it adds more stores then it will have more "problem" shoppers, where I use the term "problem" loosely. Research by Kantar Worldpanel shared with me by Ed Garner before Christmas plots the major supermarkets and independent shops on to a graph where the two axis are the percentage of upmarket ABC1 shoppers and the relative numbe...

John Speakman produced some research in 2008 that showed that people in the UK are exercising as much today as they did 25 years ago and suggesting the only way to fight obesity is to eat less. After a couple of lectures this year, the Aberdeen University professor's work has been back in the news. He found that in the UK the average calorie content of food we buy had increased by 12 per cent over the same period. In the US the rise was 25 per cent. "People would have to exercise for four to five hours a day," he says in order to lose the weight that these extra calories cause. What the food companies put in, they can also take out. Expect major manufacturers to innovate their way back to the calorie content of foods 25 years ago.

"We're blessed with a wonderful business where we sell moments of pleasure at cents a time...billions of times every day," Muhtar Kent, who heads Coca-Cola, tells the Financial Times. I have cut the quote in half because the first half is what lots of local retailers are in the business of providing in the CTN market. CTN, which stands for confectionery tobacco newsagent, is a specific term that covers a loose style of retailing where people make frequent out-of-pocket purchases. In the modern convenience store, CTN is a major category alongside top-up shopping, food to go and a food for later offering (fresh and chilled). Mr Kent is clear that selling moments of pleasure for cents at a time is a recession proof business - provided you have enough scale. Most local shop owners recognise that they are in the pennies business, needing to build sales volumes. A second theme is his commitment to investment in the future of the business. It is why Coke has supported the ...