From The Winter 2005 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Wooing the Next Generation of Breadwinners and Bread Eaters

The fact that the natural and organic categories are fast-growing sectors in the U.S. food business has become something of a maxim. We all say it, and the numbers support it. But it seems dangerous to assume the growth will continue, or that people will continue to be concerned about health and nutrition.

Whether organics continues to grow depends, to a great extent, on the mind-set of the nation’s children and teen-agers who, after all, will soon become both the breadwinners and bread eaters in this country. Will the gastronomic decisions they make and the nutritional directions they follow lead inevitably to healthier eating habits and continued growth of this sector? This seems far from assured.

In my little corner of the world, I have two teen-age sons and a 10-year-old daughter. If I were to bring natural this and organic that home, they’d count on their mother to take them out for dinner someplace else. (They take after my wife, who has never met a preservative she didn’t like.) These kids don’t even like whole-grain bread, preferring that white, airy stuff with little in the way of density or nutrients.

I recently visited my 18-year-old son at college and joined him for lunch at the cafeteria, where he proudly proclaimed that he’d been eating healthier since getting to school because there are no fast-food joints within walking distance. And then he sat down to a lunch of macaroni and cheese, bread, fried chicken and a sugary soft drink, which seemed pretty typical of the foods being eaten at dozens of other tables around us. If nutritional ignorance is culinary bliss, this was one happy college student.

In puzzling about this, I turned to Cynthia Barstow, who, in addition to having written the excellent The Eco-Foods Guide: What’s Good for The Earth Is Good for You!, also has two other credentials for such a discussion. She teaches both a Natural Products Industry class and an Intro to Food Marketing class at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has raised kids who actually have pretty healthy eating habits. I’m thinking of renting them for a week just to see if they can influence my kids through osmosis.

In the classroom, she told me, there tends to be a disconnect between the kids who are interested in natural products and those taking the marketing course. The students in the natural products class are almost always interested in acquiring the marketing and development skills necessary to bring their own products and services to fruition, while the marketing students don’t see the naturals/organics area as a place where they can make a buck—to a great extent because they aren’t living the lifestyle that would make them sympathetic to such an approach.

“Ultimately,” Barstow told me, “it comes down to information.” It comes down to providing students with data, knowledge and exposure to the naturals/organics world, and hoping that it’ll capture their imaginations. In Amherst, which is a kind of naturals/organics ground zero, that isn’t too hard—there are a number of biodynamic farms and healthy-food stores and restaurants that give the category real vitality. “I try and turn them on to this,” Barstow told me, referring to her food marketing students. “When they leave, maybe 70 percent of them are enthused about it, which is pretty good considering that when they came in, maybe 30 percent of them were enthused.”

At home, Barstow got a first-hand lesson in the power of information. She and her husband were away, and her 22-year-old stepson—whom she described as a 2005 version of a hippie—decided to show the documentary film Super Size Me to her younger children. From that point on, they’ve been completely grossed out by the whole notion of fast food—which means that aversion therapy disguised as education actually works.

I can’t help but think that what will really get kids moving in the right direction when it comes to natural and organic foods is constant exposure to products that taste great. Barstow agreed. She pointed out that the much-lauded Farmer’s Diner in Vermont, which only produces meals from products raised within 50 miles of its location, has succeeded “because it had to be a good diner to start with. You have to meet basic consumer benefits first,” she said, and then make the broader philosophical statement.

Which made me think of a great pub I went to last time I was in London—the Duke of Cambridge, a self-described “gastro pub” that serves only “seasonal, organic, fresh, uncomplicated, British rustic food with a regional European influence,” as well as organic wines, beers, ales and stouts. But what really makes the Duke of Cambridge work is that the food and beer are terrific, and the establishment looks and feels every bit the neighborhood pub (except that there’s no smoking allowed, which makes it better than most pubs). It’s not merely a good-for-you experience—it’s a great pub experience.

That, it seems, is the best kind of approach to creating a naturals/ organics category that continues to grow as our children do. Whether it is the local food store or the school cafeteria, that sense of being part of the neighborhood—of being organic to the community in more ways than one—has to be achieved.

Otherwise, the increasingly chubby, physically inactive and fast-food-addicted next generation of consumers may end up killing off the strides that the industry has made. Which wouldn’t be healthy for anyone.

Kevin Coupe covers the retail business on his Web site, www.morningnews beat.com. Contact him at kc@morningnewsbeat.com.