The Startup CPG Podcast

Marion Nesle
The cereal companies are trying to sell cereal, and the big question to ask about them is how did they get people to think that a sugary breakfast cereal an appropriate thing for kids to be eating in the morning? How did that happen? The cereal companies are very good at marketing and their goal is to sell this stuff, and they're very good at it. And so the book is about how they do that. I would say that I would give this advice to any company. If you want to be trusted, behave in a trustworthy way. Don't push the envelope on health claims. Don't push ridiculous things that aren't going to make any difference. There's this key curious need to educate the public about what's really healthy and to get the food companies to produce foods that are healthier.

01:05
Daniel Scharff
Welcome everyone, to the startup CPG Podcast. I'm really excited about today's guest because I've been asking her for about a year to come on the podcast and we finally got her. It's Marion Nestle. She is one of the most influential voices in nutrition, food policy, and public health. She's Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and helped pioneer the field of food studies as an academic discipline. Before joining nyu, she served as Senior Nutrition Policy Advisor at the US Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped oversee the landmark 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and health. She is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Food Politics, what to Eat, Soda Politics, and Unsavory Truth.

01:46
Daniel Scharff
For more than four decades, Marion studied how the big food companies influence what we eat through marketing, nutrition research, labeling, and public policy. And her work has helped shape the national conversation around food health and consumer choice. She's also become one of the most widely recognized experts on the intersection of nutrition, science and the food industry. Her newest book, Sugarcoated Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food, uses cereal boxes as a lens to explore the history of food marketing, health claims, and consumer behavior in America. I think it's really helpful for aspiring CPG entrepreneurs to understand her work and her perspectives. And I think you'll also just find it's really fun to get to know her throughout this podcast. All right, here we go. Marion, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

02:37
Daniel Scharff
I wonder if you could just start us out with a quick intro.

02:40
Marion Nesle
Sure. I'm Marion Nestle. I'm professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. I'm emerita I retired in 2017, but I'm still hanging around.

02:51
Daniel Scharff
All right. And I've heard your name so many times in and around the industry as one of the best known people in and around food policy and nutrition. I'm so excited to have you here. And I also feel really privileged that I got to check out an advanced copy of your new book, Sugarcoated, and it's all around the cereal industry. So I wondered, what made you want to write a whole book about the cereal industry?

03:18
Marion Nesle
Well, that's an easy question to answer because I've collected cereal boxes for years. I started collecting them when I was the editor of the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health that came out in 1988. And the following year, General Mills produced a serial that had the Surgeon General's recommendations on the package. And I bought the box and cut out the front panel. And then later, I started noticing cereal boxes with what I thought were absolutely ridiculous health claims on them. And I started buying cereal boxes with absurd health claims, with things that seemed really funny, with things about federal regulations. I mean, it was kind of a selective and random collection. I wasn't trying very hard.

04:12
Marion Nesle
But when my book, what to Eat, was in progress, and it's a very big book, and it sat with an editor for four months while I was waiting and waiting for that editor to get going on it, and my agent said, what are you going to do next? And I said, I would love to do something with the cereal boxes. And he said, what cereal boxes? And by that time, I had about 150, which turns out to be nothing. In the world of cereal box collectors, it turns out, well, lots of people collect cereal boxes. So he was quite puzzled by that. And I said, why don't you let me write a proposal for it?

04:55
Marion Nesle
And I remembered when I started on the proposal that 15 years earlier, I had been visiting Kellogg in Battle Creek because they had agreed to let me go through the files and look at old cereal boxes because I couldn't remember how the Nutrition Facts panel had changed. And when I got they said, do you want the good news or the bad news? And the bad news was that they weren't going to let me anywhere near the files. The good news was that they gave me color facsimiles of three different serials from the year they had been introduced until 2010, which is when I was visiting there, which means that I have an entire collection of facsimiles of all brand cereal from 1919, for Rice Krispies from 1928, and for Froot Loops from 1963.

05:54
Marion Nesle
Cereal companies change the boxes certainly every year, but often multiple times a year. And so I had this complete collection. If you want to know how much sugar Cereal had in 1974, I can look it up and show you. So were talking then about, you know, that there was obviously a book in this, just leafing through these things. The nutritionists there would say, oh, this is when the FDA did this, and this is when this rule came in, and this was when General Mills tried to do this, and this is when were sued and so forth and so on. And we knew there was a book in it, but we dropped it. But that was when I really got to know Lisa Sutherland, who was a vice president for Kellogg at the time.

06:45
Marion Nesle
And some years later, I met her again, and we talked about the possibility of a book. And went so far as to exploring the copyright issues. Could we reproduce pictures of cereal boxes legally for academic purposes? But then I lost touch with her. And so when I was writing the proposal, I thought maybe I should check with her, because she and I had talked about doing a book. And I tracked her down. She's now the president of Jacksonville University in Florida. And she said, I'm doing this book with you. And that's what we did.

07:22
Daniel Scharff
I love it.

07:22
Marion Nesle
And we had the best time. This was a terrific writing partnership. We were really equal partners in it. And she knew a lot of stuff that I didn't. I knew stuff that she didn't. It was very complimentary.

07:37
Daniel Scharff
Well, you seem like someone who would be a lot of fun to do a book with. And, like, you also have this incredible archive of all of these cereal boxes. So you were talking about, in 1988, seeing a surgeon general's recommendation on a mass cereal box, which probably a lot of people at the time wouldn't have batted an eye at, but you really took notice of that. Like, this is ridiculous.

07:59
Marion Nesle
I was thrilled. I had spent two years of my life on that report.

08:04
Daniel Scharff
That's amazing.

08:05
Marion Nesle
And here it was on a cereal box. I just wish I'd kept the whole thing. I don't keep the cereal in case anybody wonders. I just flatten the box, and they don't take up very much room. And then the other thing that happened was I asked the NYU archivist if they had any materials on cereal, and she said, oh, do you mean our cereal box collection? I said, what cereal box collection? And they had 300 cereal boxes that had been given to them by some donor who mostly collected sports figures.

08:41
Daniel Scharff
This is amazing. Wow. What a good coincidence.

08:44
Marion Nesle
And then, since then, we've learned about so many other people who have. Have collected them. I think it's an impossible thing to collect because there's too many of them.

08:53
Daniel Scharff
So I wanted to ask you that moment when you looked in 1988 and saw, like, wow, this is ridiculous. The Surgeon General's recommendation on this kind of product, you would like to think, like, oh, no, without. It's like something that would only happen way back in the past, but do you feel like that's actually still true today? And you look and you see some of the recommendations, you're like, this is bonkers.

09:13
Marion Nesle
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the cereal companies are trying to sell cereal, and the big question to ask about them is, how did they get people to think that a sugary breakfast cereal is an appropriate thing for kids to be eating in the morning? How did that happen? And it turns out there's a really long story about it, but the cereal companies are very good at marketing, and their goal is to sell this stuff, and they're very good at it. And so the book is about how they do that.

09:48
Daniel Scharff
So I've read through the book and tell me if this is a fair overgeneralization about. What happened is that people did really used to rely much more on grains in general in the American diet. And there was a lot of positive association around whole grains. And so people accepted that coming into the breakfast world. And then some of the manufacturers started adding a lot more sugar to make it much more palatable, because whole grains can be tough to actually get into a format that is even, like, chewable, but also that tastes good for people to have for breakfast. And then there were some people who added a lot of sugar, some people who tried to not add too much sugar, and then you just kind of had.

10:24
Daniel Scharff
The people went a little nuts on trying to make things that kids then would actually just love, which probably meant just dumping tons of sugar and at the same time, I think, still touting health benefits. I mean, some around the whole grains, but some around lots of other claims that they wanted people to think because they had already successfully conveyed the importance of breakfast in overall nutrition. Like, breakfast is really important. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So we need to have foods for breakfast that seem healthy. So, hey, here are some claims that we technically qualify for, even though there's also a lot of sugar in this kind of stuff. Is that, like, a fair summation of. Some of it is.

11:00
Marion Nesle
But this is some of the really amazing parts about this. I mean, These things started out as health foods in the late 1800s with Kellogg, who was a health nut. He was a physician. We would consider him a health nut. Now. He believed that whole grains were the solution to all health problems. And he followed Seventh Day Adventist principles when it came to diet and health. But he also had other very amusing ideas about it. He thought that cereals would end sexual promiscuity and would stop people from masturbating. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And he was the one who kept the cereals from having a lot of sugar. His successors couldn't put a lot of sugar into cereals until after he was dead. And so the. The really heavily sugared cereals didn't really become popular until the 1960s.

12:00
Marion Nesle
Fruit Loops started out with a lot of sugar and still has it. There are cereals that have half the calories or half the weight from sugar. And so when you look at the things that make whole grains healthy, which are the bran layers and the vitamins and minerals that they contain. Contain, and the fiber that they contain, there are a lot of breakfast cereals aimed at kids that hardly have any fiber at all.

12:26
Daniel Scharff
So what do you think has actually changed? And what hasn't changed, let's say, in the last 20, 30, 40 years? You also talk about the importance of nostalgia. Right. And it's so true. Everyone that I know who grew up, I was born in 82, so, you know, really had a lot of my formative years, late 80s, early 90s. I can tell you. 10 Cereals that I loved when I was a kid that were just only sugar. Pretty much. Probably sugar was number one or number two ingredient in all of them.

12:51
Marion Nesle
If it's number two, it's because it's splitting the kinds of sugar that it has there, so it doesn't have to list it as first.

12:59
Daniel Scharff
Yep, that's how I got my parents to buy it. Thank you. So what has changed and what hasn't? Obviously, there's a lot more awareness around sugar these days. But if I go look at the cereal aisle, I mean, I think cereal sales are probably just down a little bit in general from the height of when we all used to eat them.

13:14
Marion Nesle
Oh, they're way down. Yeah, they're way down. The cereal industry is in trouble now.

13:19
Daniel Scharff
But in terms of the offerings, what do you think has changed in the last couple decades and what hasn't?

13:24
Marion Nesle
Well, they're not nearly as much fun for me as they used to because the ridiculous health claims are gone. The FDA cracked down on Them and companies can't claim that cereals are going to prevent colds or prevent cognitive dysfunction or any of the other things that they used to do. And people aren't eating breakfast anymore. In the same way, it turns out that taking cereal out of a box, putting it into a bowl, adding milk, and having a bowl to clean up afterwards is more than a lot of people want to deal with.

13:58
Daniel Scharff
It's amazing what you say. So I'm holding in front of me a Special K box.

14:02
Marion Nesle
Yes.

14:03
Daniel Scharff
Which if you turn it around and look at the nutritional label. Okay. It says the added sugars, I think you would call kind of modest. Okay. So it has 4 grams of added sugars.

14:14
Marion Nesle
Oh, low buying cereal. Standard.

14:17
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And, you know, it tastes that way too. It doesn't taste like the crack of some of the other options out there. It is kind of wild, that, like. So on the front Here, it says 13 grams of protein. And then below it in much smaller font, 6 grams from milk, 7 grams from cereal. It's like, wait a minute, What? I mean, like, well, what kind of milk am I putting in it? And also like, I don't know, am I using one of those milks that has a lot of sugar in it or. I don't know.

14:42
Marion Nesle
Right.

14:43
Daniel Scharff
It's kind of wild, isn't it?

14:45
Marion Nesle
Well, protein is the big thing these days. So all of the cereals are trying to promote having protein in them because that's the big hot nutrient these days.

14:54
Daniel Scharff
So would you say that cereal is kind of a window into what's happening overall in food culture?

15:01
Marion Nesle
It's almost like, yeah, that's why we wrote the book.

15:03
Daniel Scharff
You know what I mean? It could be like a blank canvas for whatever trend is happening.

15:07
Marion Nesle
Yeah, that's why we wrote the book.

15:09
Daniel Scharff
Right. So does that mean that they're all adding fiber claims in the next couple of years? Because that's ellipsing protein.

15:15
Marion Nesle
Fiber maxing is a big trend right now, so they will do anything to reflect trends. There are two things about cereal boxes that make them a particularly terrific product to study. First of all, they have a big box. They take up a lot of room on shelves, and that box is a billboard. You can get a lot of information on that box. And the other thing is that they change the package designs often multiple times a year, sometimes once a month. I mean, there's some serials that do that so they can quickly respond to changes in rules. One of the things that I'm looking at right now is what are they doing about artificial color additives? Because the government has said that it wants companies to remove the artificial additives.

16:06
Marion Nesle
And so far, I've only seen one cereal, General Mills Trix, that has actually done that. And Trix is still being sold with the artificial additives, but there's now a version that has vegetable dyes, not the petroleum dyes. So that's a quick response to a federal request that companies remove these dyes. It's voluntary. They don't have to do it, but they are. And so you see a very rapid response to whatever's going on. You see them producing special boxes for holidays, special boxes for special occasions, special boxes for individual celebrities.

16:53
Daniel Scharff
I did enjoy it. In your book, you call out one collectible, which is a Stan Musial, who's a Cardinals legend box of Wheaties. I think that goes for about 5,000 bucks, which is if I had an extra 5k sitting around, I might buy for my dad, who was a Cardinals fan growing up, that'd be pretty cool. So you like this because it's, like, fun and nostalgic, but it just is such a good illustration of marketing because of how big the box is and how ridiculous some of the stuff is. I know you also call out, like, how big is a serving size? I don't know. I'm holding a couple boxes here. One of them says one and a quarter cups. The other says one.

17:27
Daniel Scharff
I know there are others that when they needed to get the absolute calorie count down, just drop down to three quarters of a cup as a suggested serving size. Like it's the Wild West a little bit, isn't it?

17:36
Marion Nesle
Oh, absolutely. And it's very simple, actually. The companies are just trying to sell product, and they'll do whatever they can that's legal to get you to buy the product. Every now and then they cross a line, and then the FDA gets upset, and then they have to back off on it. But again, because they can change the boxes so often, they could be very responsive to whatever's going on.

18:01
Daniel Scharff
Marionne, do you have friends who work at some of these big CPG companies? Have you, like, known people, well, who work at them?

18:06
Marion Nesle
No. I mean, Lisa Sutherland, my co author, is kind of the only one. I have known others, and I've certainly been at meetings with food company executives.

18:17
Daniel Scharff
The reason that I ask is because I actually worked at Mars Chocolate for three years, which I honestly really enjoyed my time there. That was my introduction into the CPG world. And from that time, I learned that I loved cpg and I didn't necessarily care as much about the Specific products that they were making. Because I think when we talk about the big CPGs and like, some of these health things, I think we're like, yeah, they just want to sell more. But it's interesting to me to think about, like, the actual people behind these products and the marketers who I know and like, they really are, in my opinion, good people who work there and have long careers there and want to do good at their jobs.

18:55
Daniel Scharff
I don't know that they think about it so deeply in that way of, like, really what are these products that we're selling and the place that they have? And I think there are a lot of ways that you can justify it to yourself of, like, these are really affordable products and we need to have affordable products out there for people. We can't all eat the organic pasture raised massaged hens, eggs for breakfast every morning, stuff like that. So that's kind of why I mentioned it. Of just like, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's hard to really, like, know exactly their motivations other than probably everybody working there is trying to do a good job at their job.

19:29
Marion Nesle
Absolutely. They're just doing their job. And before there was childhood obesity. They're doing their job was never an issue once childhood obesity started. And that only happened beginning in the 1980s. I mean, once it became a really serious problem, I was part of that. Then things changed and they were caught by surprise. I've certainly been at plenty of meetings with food industry executives. I would agree with you completely. They're really nice people and they really think they're doing good work. But I heard a food industry executive say at a meeting at the White House, actually during the Obama administration, I wish we could stop marketing to children. I know it's wrong. I wish we could stop, but our stockholders won't let us. And I was just floored by that. Not at the sentiment, but I'd never heard it stated so baldly and openly.

20:27
Marion Nesle
And he was just stating the reality of his particular job. His job was to get people to buy more food, regardless of the consequences on their health.

20:38
Daniel Scharff
I wonder what the interaction is of that kind of stuff with social media now, because social media has become such an important discovery tool for so many products. But honestly, I don't know how this works, But I have to assume that it's harder for them to then market to children, who by and large are not on those platforms or probably can't be served ads in the same way.

20:57
Marion Nesle
Not at all. They pay influencers.

21:00
Daniel Scharff
Oh, it's the Influencers that they know a lot of kids are following.

21:03
Marion Nesle
They hire influencers to do the marketing. They pay them. And sometimes the influencers disclose that they're being paid, and sometimes they don't. No, I mean, that's. Marketing has moved online where it's very difficult to monitor.

21:18
Daniel Scharff
Yeah.

21:19
Marion Nesle
And very few people are monitoring it because it's very difficult to do. And it's enormously effective.

21:26
Daniel Scharff
It's a big shift because, I mean, yeah, like the big TV ads that probably aired during our Saturday morning cartoons. But also just the shelf placement. Right. Like, you always hear about this, that they would strategically place really sugary cereals very low to the ground at the grocery stores. Because that's eye level for some little tykes like me. Like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna get those Froot Loops, all the sugar. Let's go.

21:47
Marion Nesle
And they have cartoons and licensed characters on the front and often that are in kids movies, that kind of thing. And those are very appealing to kids. So that taking a small child to a supermarket is very difficult to do. It's tantrum inducing if you say no to what a kid wants. But the whole shelf space thing is really interesting because companies pay supermarkets in order to have their products displayed in places where they will be most seen. And this explains what's happened to Cheerios. Boring old original Cheerios used to be the cereal that everybody fed their kid because it was low in sugar. It is still low in sugar, and the original is still low in sugar. And it was easy for kids. Kids didn't choke on it, which was very important.

22:41
Marion Nesle
Now there are 20 different kinds of Cheerios, many of them sugar sweetened, many of them with chocolate, with marshmallows, with candy, with whatever. Because Cheerios could then take up more shelf space and be more visible. I mean, there are rules about supermarkets. The more shelf space, the more people buy, the easier products are to see. The more people buy, the longer they're in the supermarket, the more they buy and so forth and so on. But the cereal aisle is incredible. I love it. I mean, I just have such a good time going to supermarkets and seeing what's there.

23:21
Daniel Scharff
I think that is the thing that actually even drew me into this industry. I was in management consulting, doing back office cost reduction for a bunch of boring stuff. I was like, what's the opposite of this? Oh, those kind of products that are fun and so easy to relate to it. And so I think it is those big mass market brands that I was thinking of when I got into this industry. But then I think as the industry was evolving, so was how I was thinking about that and what was right for me personally and just what I felt good about putting out there into the world as well, which led me into more of the natural products industry. But speaking of that evolution, then, like, fast forward today.

23:55
Daniel Scharff
Are there brands out there that you feel like are doing a good job of balancing convenience with also health? Like I've heard people talk about this, especially who are really deep on nutrition, who are like, yeah, obviously in a perfect world everyone would be eating these like perfect whole foods and taking time to prepare them and cook them in a very clean way. But like it doesn't happen this way. So like there are some brands that do a good job of finding that balance.

24:22
Marion Nesle
Well, they try. They try. And what I would call the health food brands which are using clean ingredients and not adding sugar, some of them are better than others. You have to read the ingredient lists very carefully to make sure they're not putting in allulose or artificial sweeteners of one kind or another. And they also cost a lot more. I mean, really a lot more. And people are buying them because they think they're healthier for their kids. The cereal that I eat is a very boring. I'm post mini wheats. It's a one ingredient cereal. It's got whole wheat and a preservative and that's it. I add my own sugar and I add fruit. That's how I like to eat it. I think it's fine. It's got a lot of fiber and it seems to me to do what cereals are supposed to be doing.

25:15
Marion Nesle
I like the texture. I don't know. Anyway, that's the one I eat. But these other things, I'm just shocked by the ingredient list. And if it's got more than one or two ingredients, it's ultra processed. And I mean, there's a lot of evidence that ultra processed foods aren't good for you.

25:33
Daniel Scharff
Yep. Speaking of ultra processed foods, there's a lot of awareness these days and a lot of movement around food policy from the government as well to try to affect change across the country in specific states, things are happening as well. How do you view a lot of the changes that people are pushing for now, that people are becoming much more aware of specific ingredients and colors and flavors, all that kind of stuff. And how do you think it'll affect cereal also?

26:00
Marion Nesle
Well, it affects cereal because the rule is, or the message is eat real food and avoid ultra processed foods. And those two messages exclude most cereals that are in supermarket aisles, I mean, really exclude them. If they've got an artificial sweetener, they're ultra processed. If they've got a whole lot of texturizers and colors, and even if they have vegetable colors, they're still ultra processed. So they're going to affect cereals a lot. But the biggest trend affecting cereals is that people aren't eating cereal for breakfast as much anymore. They want things on the go. They want bagels, they want Pop tarts, they want whatever where they could just grab it and take it and go and eat it in a car if necessary, or eat it on the run. Sitting down and eating meals is something that for many people is not in their lifestyle.

27:00
Marion Nesle
More and more people and the researchers who check these things are finding family meals to be an increasingly rare event in a lot of people's lives. If people have kids, they order in for each child. And that's a huge societal change for which I think our society bears a lot of responsibility. People don't have a lot of time. They want convenience. And all of a sudden, breakfast cereals aren't as convenient as they used to be. They've become less convenient than lots of other things. This is really tough on the cereal industry, which is moving into more convenient options. So you can buy a pack of cereal where all you have to do is add milk to the pack and throw the whole thing out afterwards. So those are societal changes that affect every consumer good, but they certainly affect cereals a lot.

28:00
Daniel Scharff
I was really curious what Marion actually eats for breakfast. And you told me without me even having.

28:05
Marion Nesle
That's when I eat for breakfast. Blueberries.

28:08
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. And cereal, though. Packaged cereal that you buy from the store, but minimal ingredients.

28:12
Marion Nesle
Yeah, I just like it. I like the crunch of it. And I've gotten used to it. And I don't eat breakfast very early. I'm a late breakfast eater. I don't really get hungry until 10:30 or 11. And that's when I like having cereal and fruit. It seems like a really nice way to start the day. It's how I do it.

28:32
Daniel Scharff
Marion, I know we've focused a lot talking about cereal because it is really interesting to me personally and definitely to our audience, which is a CPG consumer packaged goods audience. But I have to ask a little about some of the other work that you've done in a really prolific career. I wonder, just for people who don't know your work as well, would you mind just telling people some of the stuff that you're most proud of? Some of the works or impacts or messaging that you really hope that everybody out there hears from your work.

29:00
Marion Nesle
Yeah. I write books about food politics, starting with a book called Food Politics, which came out first in 2002 and two subsequent editions. And I'm currently working on the 25th anniversary edition, which will come out in 2027. And it's a book about how the food industry influences food choices. I started out by observing that food company marketing had a great deal to do with what people were eating, but nobody was paying any attention to it. And I was going to a lot of meetings on childhood obesity in the 1990s in which everybody would say nutrition scientists would be talking about how are we going to get moms to feed their kids more healthfully? And everybody was talking about that and nobody was saying, how are we going to get the food industry to stop marketing junk foods to our kids?

29:56
Marion Nesle
Absolutely nobody was saying that. So I thought I was just describing the obvious. When Food Politics came out in 2002, and the first question I was always asked was, what does food have to do with politics? I don't get asked that anymore. I really don't. People have learned what food has to do with politics, but there have been subsequent books. I did a book about calories. I did a book called what to Eat and then revised it last year to what to Eat. Now it's a 700 page book analyzing the way supermarkets sell food. Basically, I went aisle by aisle through the supermarket and talked about every issue I could think of related to the foods in that section. There's a chapter on cereals that in a sense was the basis for this book.

30:48
Marion Nesle
And I have a book about how the food industry sponsors research to protect its own products and promote its own products. I've got a cartoon book that I absolutely adore which was a collection of Food Politics cartoons, a collaboration with a cartoon bank that supplied the cartoons. That was a fun book. I have a memoir that came out a few years ago that talked about why I do this and how I do it. Very difficult for me to evaluate the impact of anything that I do. I have to leave that up to other people to do. I have no way of quantifying impact other than lots of people have told me that they read Food Politics and went into food as a career. That's exciting, but I can't quantify it. So I have to lead that other people.

31:43
Daniel Scharff
Well, it's definitely cited very often, so that definitely talks a lot about the impact of it. And I guess how do you feel about the direction of the kind of choices consumers are making now. Obviously, it's not a perfect world. There are tons of flaws. A lot of the problems are different problems or not going away. We as a society are not in perfect health as well. But do you feel like there are signs that we're going in a better direction?

32:12
Marion Nesle
Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I certainly people are more aware that obesity. I mean, 75% of American adults are overweight or obese. So let's just start with that. They're overweight or they have obesity, which is the way we're talking about it now. That makes it normal in 20 to 30% of kids that has normalized being overweight in a way that's quite shocking to those of us who remember what kids looked like in the 1950s and 60s and what they look like now. They're bigger now, and people are bigger now. I just saw a statistic. I had no idea if it's true that 1 out of 11American adults weighs more than 300 pounds. I wish I could find a source for that particular statistic. But if that's true, that's astounding.

33:04
Marion Nesle
So we're in a situation in which everybody would like to be healthier, and in some cases that means thinner. The GLP1 drugs are completely changing the landscape for this. But I think everybody wants to be healthy, and everybody wants to eat in a more healthful way. And food companies have to appeal to those health wishes in ways that may or may not be scientifically justified. And that brings me to the wellness movement, which is a movement that identifies products or devices as ways to make people healthier, often with very little evidence to back it up. I would put supplements in that category. Lots of people take supplements. Supplements make people feel better. There's no question about that. But whether that's for scientific or psychological reasons is not clear. So I think it's great that people want to be healthier.

34:08
Marion Nesle
I wish everybody could afford to eat more healthfully. I wish people had access to healthier food at a price they could afford. I wish it were more obvious which foods are healthier and which are not. And I'm hoping that the government will come up with labels that will help people identify those kinds of things. The Make America Healthy Again movement shares much in common with the kinds of things I've talked about for decades. Whether they're going to be able to do anything is another matter. It's still too early to say.

34:44
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I agree with that. And by the way, I do want to Do a store tour with you someday. I feel like that would be so interesting. Interesting just to walk aisle by aisle.

34:52
Marion Nesle
Oh, fun to do. Yeah.

34:54
Daniel Scharff
We'll have to get our startup CPG group to come and learn from you in a store sometime. One of our local New York grocers.

35:01
Marion Nesle
I would be happy to do that.

35:03
Daniel Scharff
Yes, we would love that. So, one last question to wrap up here. So a lot of the work that you're doing is looking at some of these massive CPG companies that, especially in the cereal industry, were born in the late 1800s and then other companies spawned out of them and they have captured the majority of the share in the serial aisle. So a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are aspiring or current CPG entrepreneurs. A lot of them have big dreams to build big companies. Whether or not it's going to be one of those massive CPGs or they're going to go for an exit at some point. I wonder if there's a message that you would love to have for all of them, like maybe the same message you would have loved to give to all of these other CPG entrepreneurs.

35:46
Daniel Scharff
Creating the serial companies early on in how they should think about building their products and the marketing. Is there something that you would love for all of these entrepreneurs to have in mind as they're building their companies?

35:56
Marion Nesle
Well, first of all, I need to say I'm very worried about the serial companies. The mergers and acquisitions that they're going through now and the divestments are very disturbing. If they're being bought by venture capital companies and they have only one goal and that's profit, they're certainly not going to be doing any kind of social service. I would say that I would give this advice to any company. If you want to be trusted, behave in a trustworthy way. Don't push the envelope on health claims. Don't push ridiculous things that aren't going to make any difference. They would come back and say, but we can't sell our product any other way. I mean, food companies have a very. It's hard to know what they cause and where the demand is from the public.

36:45
Marion Nesle
But it seems to me the obvious observation is that the more sugar they put in cereals, the more people want to buy it. They like them better. Sugar is yummy and it's fine in small amounts, but boy, it adds up quickly. So it's hard to say. In the book Sugar Coated, we talk about the environmental claims made by cereal companies, the health claims, the nutrition claims, and the ways in which these companies are marketing to specific targeted groups, using celebrities or using music or using whatever it is. They're using every single thing they can think of. And we have pictures of our favorite examples. Actually, we don't have a picture of what my current favorite cereal is, which is the protein supplemented cookies and cream Cheerios cereal, which just seems so good. Really. Come on.

37:47
Daniel Scharff
Oh my gosh.

37:48
Marion Nesle
What people are going to buy and that's what they're going to make if that's what sells. So there's this curious need to educate the public about what's really healthy and to get the food companies to produce foods that are healthier. I don't think they're going to be as profitable. The stockholders are going to get cranky. And that's the basic problem with all of this, is cranky stockholders.

38:14
Daniel Scharff
I definitely appreciate that perspective. I also have this deep desire, Marion, to take you to the sweets and snacks trade show, which I don't know if you've ever been to that.

38:24
Marion Nesle
No. But I would love to.

38:27
Daniel Scharff
Let's go together next year. It's the annual gathering of all of the biggest companies in sweets and snacks and you're going to see the huge booths of all the candy makers and all.

38:38
Marion Nesle
You can get me into it. I go in a shot.

38:41
Daniel Scharff
We'll find a way. We'll sneak you in. Well, Marion, I really want to thank you for coming on today. As you know, I've been chasing you down for a long time. Really eager to get you on the podcast and just share a lot of your knowledge with our listener base here. So thank you very much. Just to end up, I wonder, can you tell people just the details about the book, when it's coming out, where they would be able to get it, all the good stuff?

39:03
Marion Nesle
So sugarcoated. Unboxing the Secrets of Cereal Companies. It has a subtitle, I never can remember it. It's coming out September 8th. It'll be available September 8th. It's already available for pre order in all the places where you can pre order books. It has 44 illustrations, full color, full page, which was really generous of the publisher. And we thought it was a really a lot of fun to do and we hope people think it's fun to read.

39:37
Daniel Scharff
It definitely is. Thank you again for letting me check it out. I think everybody out there, if you are interested in cereal or food culture and food politics or you just really like looking at a bunch of interesting cereal box covers for any of those reasons, you will definitely enjoy this historical look at cereal. And it's Just a lens to look at food policy, I think, and how it impacts the actual food that ends up on shelves. So big congrats to you and Lisa.

40:04
Marion Nesle
Thanks. And if I can just say one more thing. If people are interested in these kinds of topics, I write a daily blog@foodpolitics.com that people can subscribe to when it gets sent to their box, their email box, once a day. Perfect.

40:18
Daniel Scharff
Perfect. And I'm one of the people who also follows you on LinkedIn, where I know you do some posts as well that are up to the minute. So definitely give Marion a follow on there. Thank you so much. I will look forward to the store tour. And yeah, congrats again on the book.

40:33
Marion Nesle
Great. And don't forget, I want to do that.

40:35
Daniel Scharff
Yes. All right, we're in. Okay, thank you.

40:38
Marion Nesle
Bye.

40:40
Daniel Scharff
Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of the day, another episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast. We're a community of brands and experts. And you should join. You can sign up @startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're going to hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? For? I will see you there or on our next episode. Bye. Bye.