I’m a bit nervous for any company staking its future on healthier fare. From With Food Sales Flat, Nestle Stakes Future on Healthier Fare:
With the industry facing stagnant sales growth, Nestle is looking for growth in the intersection of food and pharmaceuticals — a niche of nutritionally enhanced products known in the business as ‘phood.’ The company is betting that health-conscious consumers will pay more for fare that provides health benefits such as lowering cholesterol or aiding digestion.
Phood. I like that. Almost as clever as pharm animals.
Anyway, it sounds like they’ve come up with some interesting phoods. Whether they’ll make any money is the real question:
Nestle sells a breakfast bar called Nestival containing carbohydrates that are absorbed slowly and make people feel full more quickly. It has developed a type of milk protein that could help fight cavities, and a chocolate component that limits the absorption of “bad” cholesterol. And it has won regulatory approval for a cholesterol-lowering ingredient for products such as juice and ice cream.Its most ambitious project — a line of yogurts called LC1, designed to help digestion and boost the immune system — was a bust in a number of European markets in the late 1990s. Other companies have also struggled to make nutritionally boosted food a success. Campbell Soup Co.’s Intelligent Quisine cholesterol-lowering meals flopped in the late 1990s. In 2001, Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis AG dropped Aviva, a line of foods jointly developed with Quaker Oats Co. that were designed to boost heart, bone and digestive health. The venture lasted about 18 months, and the products were launched in a number of European markets.
I didn’t realize Nestle’s history:
Nestle, which has $69 billion in sales and sells its products in 120 countries, has a long history of crossing food and science. The company was founded in 1866 when Henri Nestle, a German pharmacist who saw five of his 13 siblings die as children, invented baby formula.