Marty Kaplan: Corporate Food Giants Have Reason to Worry!

Some very brave Supermarkets are sharing nutritional score numbers with customers. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price per unit, which I am used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100, a "NuVal" score. NuVal scores don't tip you off to a bargain. They tell you how good or bad a food is for your health. Yeah, right. The idea that a food store would admit, would explicitly declare, on the spot, as your hand is reaching for it, that a product it's selling is nutritionally crappy, that violates every principle of Marketing 101, not to mention Ayn Rand 101. This is different from the labels that the US Food and Drug Administration has required since 1990. Those are well intentioned marvels of confusion, containing so much information, are you getting your minimum daily requirement of magnesium?, so much disinformation, calculating calories per serving, when a serving is half the amount a runaway waif would eat, so much incomprehensible information. I forget, is tri potassium phosphate good or bad for you? that you can get an anxiety attack trying to figure out which granola will nourish you, and which will kill you. But NuVal stores make that simple, and sometimes shocking. Cocoa Puffs, for example, gets a NuVal score of 26, but so does Life. "you don't have to be a grown up to benefit from the whole grain inside", and Kashi Strawberry Fields Cereal, plenty of whole grain goodness, gets a 10, same as Cap'n Crunch. An apple gets a 96, which you might expect, but unsweetened applesauce gets a 29, apple juice gets a 15, and Mott's Original Applesauce, a great tasting snack that's actually good for you, gets a 4. Nabisco Nilla Wafers, simple goodness, get a 6, and Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi Grain Crackers get a 3. You'd expect fresh broccoli to get 100, as does Birds Eye Cooked Winter Squash. Grapefruits are 99, and sweet potatoes are 96, but Vlasic Old Fashioned Sauerkraut gets a 4. Skim milk comes in at 91, 1 percent milk at 91, and 2 percent at 55. Capri Sun gets a 1. So does Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade with 20 percent juice. Who would buy products like these, if they actually knew what empty calories they amount to, and if they had manifestly better alternatives an arm's reach away?