The business of healthy eating

It struck me this morning that the business of eating healthily presents a potentially unsolvable dilemma for business...

Healthy eating = real, unprocessed foods = local, small producers = small food

while...

Unhealthy eating = processed food = large, global manufacturers = BIG FOOD

BIG FOOD has a stranglehold over consumers:

• Food addictions, especially to sugar (and the metabolically close relations, starches) are a human condition that we all share. Though our responses to this addiction are very individual, the common ground is the way our bodies respond to these substances, craving more and more.
• Availability - go into any supermarket and be confronted with thousands of choices, most of which are the choices between unhealthy options
• Marketing - many unhealthy foods are marketed by focussing on the least unhealthy element (in the consumers mind, no regard to the science) eg "low fat" and my personal favourite "no added sugar" ('favourite' because it usually masks a whole lot of artificial sweeteners, which many studies have shown to be even worse for us than sugar)
• Price - Sugar and carbohydrates are cheap. Just compare the price per gram of a loaf of bread with even the cheapest cut of meat.
• Product Differentiation - the foods that are best for us are generic and cannot easily be "differentiated" in marketing speak (meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, nuts and seeds) while the unhealthy stuff is largely branded, packaged and subject to being "marketed"
• Convenience - we crave the easy life, and the supermarket is just easier than the farm shop
• Longevity - ever noticed how supermarket "fresh" vegetables last suspiciously longer than allegedly equally "fresh" ones bought at a farm shop? This means that we need to shop less frequently in supermarkets, and more than weekly in farm shops etc. That's just too much trouble, even for the most ardent supporters of fresh, local, organic, real food.

The campaign for real food, on the other hand, depends on a large number of individual consumers seeing through all of this and choosing, often at higher cost, lower convenience, the healthy real food way. And that's hard. I'm a committed real food advocate (Really? You couldn't tell?) and I find it tough. I usually get the farm shop twice a week but still need to "top-up" at the supermarket. The farm shop is kind of convenient, being on my journey between home and my gym...but is still out of the way compared to the very convenient supermarket. In fact, in terms of convenience, I can get to 2 large Tesco stores, 1 Tesco Express, 1 Morrisons, 1 Co-op and 1 Nisa faster than I can get to the nearest farm shop. And I live in the country. For the majority of urban dwellers, forget it!

I have looked at the economics of a start-up business, looking to deliver locally produced fresh produce in a medium sized city, numerous times a week, using sustainable delivery methods. The problems are numerous:

• Distance - food miles are almost impossible to avoid in getting the produce from the growers to the consumers
• Price - buying economies of scale are limited in such a scenario
• Profit margin - as I stated above, real food are commodities, and as all business people will know, commodities are incredibly difficult to turn a margin on. It is the processing of ingredients that is the "value add" in the supply chain, enabling a decent margin on ready meals, while prohibiting much (or any) margin on fresh real food. Look no further than milk prices for this demonstration...real, fresh milk: price paid by supermarkets to producers is below cost (consumer price @ c. 25p per litre). Milk drinks with added sugar and chemicals: massive mark-up for the manufacturers and supermarket (price @ roughly 75p per litre). The same applies to meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
• Range - even if you could provide 100% of the consumer food needs through such a business, what about all the other products that we know and love and can't leave out. Clothes still need washing, floors need cleaning, pets need feeding, babies need nappies. It would be a challenge to find more than a handful of households that also eschew all of these products, and why should they? What this does mean though is further inconvenience.

All things together, the threshold for the vast majority of consumers in terms of price and convenience, mainly convenience, is simply too high to effect much change.

I am still convinced that there is a key to all this that will unlock the problem. Maybe it's in the hidden healthcare costs of our current system catching up with us. Maybe it's in taxation of sugar containing products.

Or maybe the willingness of consumers to accept the trade-off - or better still to see the trade-offs as worthwhile and valuable - is growing and will continue to grow in a groundswell of real food.

I hope so. And if you read this, I urge you to join in. Start small, start with yourself. Get yourself down to your local farm shop. And if you live in a big city and there is really no option, order online from the organic delivery guys (I know Abel & Cole but other suppliers are available...)

And if enough people join in, maybe that start-up delivery business of mine will have a chance.