Growth to Continue for 'Functional' Foods

The market for “functional foods” will continue to grow at its current pace, and will be 50 percent larger in 2012 than it was in 2006, according to a study by Scientia Advisors, a consultancy. (You have to register with the company to download the study.)

A food is “functional” when something is added to it in order to make it appear healthier in some way, whether or not it actually is healthier. In recent years, some studies have determined that nutrients divorced from their source may not do much good, if any. As Scientia’s Bob Jones told public radio’s The World on Monday, beta carotene on its own “doesn’t work nearly as well as just eating a carrot.”

The study outlines the differences in marketing functional foods in various countries. Perhaps surprisingly, the United States regulates them more heavily than anyone else and puts up “the greatest hurdles” to marketing them, Jones said.

Still, the U.S. is where they are most popular, and hence here is where you will find the most calcium-enriched orange juice. Oranges, it must be noted, do not naturally contain calcium, and other sources, such as dairy products, are much better for delivering calcium to the human body.

The study offers several lessons for those companies that insist on marketing functional foods. Jones tells the tale of Finnish margarine. In Finland, people eat six to eight times the amount of margarine as they do in the United States. When a company added a cholesterol-lowering agent to margarine, the Finns went crazy for it.

But when they tried it in the United States, it was a flop. That’s because “the U.S. consumer does not think of margarine as a good delivery vehicle for good health,” Jones said. Also, the stuff tasted awful and was very expensive, and consumers would have to eat Finnish-level amounts of it to get any of the supposed health benefits. Jones quoted the hypothetical U.S. consumer saying “Let me see if I can understand this: I have to eat a bathtub full of this in order to lower my cholesterol?”