Food fear is anti-bST marketing tool

Feedstuffs
September 25, 2006

To the Editor:

Maybe it was an inevitable development. Dean Foods (annual corporate revenue in excess of $10 billion in the U.S.) has recently announced that it will no longer accept milk in some of its New England processing plants from dairies that use recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) in their cows.

Given Dean Food's share of the market in the region (about 70% of milk) and, thus, its market dominance, its decision in effect requires dairy producers across New England to stop using a technology that is profitable, exhaustively researched and shown to be safe, has no effect on the milk Dean Foods processes and that has been very widely used across the U.S. dairy industry for more than a decade.

I rather suspect that some would say that the decision was in response to consumers who want to buy milk from cows not treated with rbST. I have no doubt that there are small numbers of consumers for whom rbST is an issue, since there has been a niche market for "milk from cows not treated with rbST" since the hormone was approved for use in the dairy industry.

In my opinion, authentic consumer demand is not driving things here. Instead, I am suspicious that the choice may be part of a deliberate marketing strategy. It may be more plausible that Dean Foods decided that it could increase or defend its market share and/or command a markup in price with "rbST free" milk that it couldn't with "generic milk."

Market differentiation in any retail industry is nothing new. As consumers, we all are bombarded each day with products claiming to be different from the competition.

Designer perfumes command a higher price based on the glitz they can build around their brand, not what is really in the bottle. It was Mr. Revlon himself who said: "In the factory, Revlon manufactures cosmetics; in the store, we sell hope."

For perfume companies competing for a bit of people's disposable income, this is a pretty harmless game. With food, it is not. The truth is that milk from cows treated with rbST is the same as milk from cows not treated, but if you can create a fear in the public's mind that there is a dangerous difference, then you have a way to differentiate your product, capture market share and charge more for the same milk.

Other major food corporations, not to mention the organic food industry, have been using the power of first creating and then marketing "food fear" for some time.

One large corporation has been advertising "cholesterol-free corn oil," playing on consumer ignorance that no vegetable oil has cholesterol. Another major corporation advertised chicken with "no hormones and no steroids added" while knowing that this was true of all chicken.

The word "hormone" is really handy if you want to scare the average consumer. Never mind that such campaigns undermine the consumer's confidence in the generic product and add to consumer doubts about all food production. Never mind that in the case of rbST, there is no way to actually verify that the claim you make is really true. Never mind that the decision hurts the dairy producers that were profitably using an approved, well-established production technology in their herds.

In the Northeast in particular, where else were they going to go to sell their milk? Never mind that removing rbST from the industry will increase the cost of production to dairy producers and, ultimately, the price of dairy products to consumers. Never mind that removing rbST increases the dairy industry's impact on the environment. It is the processor's near-term volume and margin that matter here.

The dairy industry (and all food production industries) needs to understand that this is not really about rbST. It is just this moment's convenient target. This is about who will control the production and distribution of food. It is about whether determined and well-funded special interests and dominant corporate entities can partner with each other to push out competition and charge more for what is really the same food.

If this places irrelevant demands on producers, that's their problem. Dairy producers may shrug and say they can do without rbST. As they do so, they need to understand that there will be other targeted production technologies to follow, many with a weaker scientific base of evidence for safety, welfare or environmental impact.

One can safely predict that this decision, taking advantage of deliberately generated "food fear," will be used by advocacy groups to build momentum as they attract donations and target whatever next production practice they decide to dislike for whatever self-interested reason.

Corporate interests will jump on the bandwagon in a greedy effort to capture some temporary advantage in the marketplace. More ill-conceived demands will be made of producers: rationality, science, practical impacts, environmental and consumer costs not withstanding. The abundant, efficient and cost-effective production of wholesome food for society will be the victim.

From my vantage, I can only say: "May your children live in the society you help create."

John Fetrow VMD, MBA
Professor
Dairy production medicine
College of Veterinary Medicine
University of Minnesota

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