Food Labeling and Packaging

Subscribe to Food Labeling and Packaging

Orange blogOranges possess a special cachet in the American dream.  Growing up in the baby-boomer era meant that you heard—“breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine”—thousands of times while watching rerun episodes of Leave it to Beaver and The Flintstones.

As my breakfast chore, I would dutifully mix three cans of tap water with one can of “fresh” frozen concentrated orange juice.  Voilà, we had our morning OJ, just like Anita Bryant’s cheery TV family.  Little did I know that the 3-to-1 formula was patented—to quench a mass-produced taste for sweet orange flavor.

As a youngster, I was also oblivious to the barrage of cognitive priming—in the form of TV ads, radio jingles, point-of-purchase placards, etc.—that would stimulate my desire to eat oranges and drink their juice to this day.  Memory traces of orange flavor are encoded in my brain.

How does the flavor of an orange leave its memories lodged somewhere in the hippocampus[1] region of the brain for later retrieval?  Behind the scenes, intellectual property rights have long shaped—and marketers have long exploited—our innate, neuropsychological demand for foodstuffs. Continue Reading How Intellectual Property Rights Shape Neuropsychological Demand for Orange Flavors

blog photoPoliticians often referred to a 90% consumer preference for food labels signaling the existence of genetically modified ingredients—or GMOs as they are known—during this year’s congressional hearings regarding the now enacted “National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard.”

This consumer sentiment appeared irrational to some legislative representatives, believing it defied “hard science” showing that GMO foods are “safe” to eat.  Others commented on how consumer reactions to GMO foods were highly-charged and fraught with “emotions.”

Unfortunately, the rushed legislative GMO labeling debate only skimmed the surface of consumer psychology as it relates to an expressed desire for GMO food labeling.

Discomfort with new foodstuffs resides in our age-old “omnivore’s dilemma,” where what you put in your mouth and swallow can possibly injure or leave you and your family on your death beds in Darwinian fashion.  You are what you eat after all.[1]

Innate emotions—such as disgust, fear, distress, anger and rage—arise from and can be amplified by moral notions of food sanctity and its opposite, food contamination and degradation.  As a classic 1970s Chiffon margarine commercial once proclaimed to crackling lightning and thunder: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

This post examines GMO food labeling from the developing perspective of “moral foundations” psychology, a topic overlooked in recent hearings.  In doing so, it exposes the fallacy of the “rationalist’s delusion,”—an outmoded, but convenient line of argument that denigrates innate consumer distrust of GMO foodstuffs. Continue Reading GMO Food Labels, Our Emotions and the “Rationalist’s Delusion”

starlet1How do you tempt someone to trim, steam (or boil) artichokes and scrape spiny artichoke leaves with their front teeth?

Here’s an easy answer.  Crown a newly minted Marilyn Monroe as Castroville’s first Artichoke Queen in February 1948.[1]  Chances are—you’d gnaw on anything she promotes with her magnetic smile.

Californians certainly followed Norma Jeane’s lead.  In 2013, California proclaimed the artichoke as its state vegetable.  In fact, 99% of the nation’s crop is grown on this strip of land angled against the Pacific.[2]

Transforming a somewhat user-unfriendly vegetable into a staple of the American diet is a more confounding matter.  This article examines innovative patenting, branding and merchandising efforts associated with this superfood thistle.[3] Continue Reading Starlet Marketing, Patenting and Branding of the California Artichoke