Haagen-Dazs's new line of ice cream, Five, doesn't hide the ingredients in tiny type on the back of the carton. Every one -- milk, cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla bean -- is prominently displayed in bright-orange capital letters. The fact that the brand's regular vanilla bean ice cream also has just five ingredients is beside the point. Food marketers have come to realize that simplicity sells.
Frito-Lay is boasting that its potato chips, tortilla chips and even Fritos are each made with just three ingredients. The hope: that consumers will equate fewer ingredients with healthfulness, even when it comes to ice cream and chips.
"It's a convergence of health, food safety, taste and traceability,"said Phil Lempert, a food and consumer behavior analyst who calls himself the Supermarket Guru. "People are reading labels more carefully than they were previously. When they pick up a product and it has 30 ingredients and they don't know what half of them are, they are putting it back on the shelves."
For Frito-Lay, a focus on real ingredients is a new way to help consumers overcome their guilt about eating snack chips. Last year, the company redesigned the back panels of bags of Lay's potato chips, Tostitos tortilla chips and Fritos. The Lay's bag shows a pile of fresh potatoes. On Tostitos' bag, an ear of corn has the husk pulled back to show it filled with corn chips. "It's anecdotal, but we've had people tell us that they didn't know there were potatoes in potato chips,"Gonzalez said. "What it is trying to reinforce is our agricultural base. People forget corn chips come from corn."
Frito-Lay potato chips: three simple ingredients
