Hunt’s is an iconic American brand, perhaps known best as the number two brand of ketchup next to Heinz, released a new advertising campaign this past Monday. The after-Christmas marketing and advertising direction poised to take them into 2017 and it features a field of tomatoes with the voice-over: “No GMOs in sight”.
The campaign, on the surface, might seem rather benign to the average consumer. However, the campaign and the inference that Hunt’s products used non-GMO tomatoes was met with swift resistance by those in a variety of areas of expertise.
The issue being: that there are no GMOs in tomatoes that are sold to consumers in any form in the United States. The claim by Hunt’s (parent company ConAgra Foods) is now being viewed as the company trying to essentially trick the American consumer into thinking that the competition uses or contains GMO ingredients.
Furthermore, the campaign by Hunt’s is being seen as a way to capitalize on the American consumer and their inherent aversion to GMO containing food products. In the essence of the situation here, the bottom line is that it looks dishonest by the company that they are making a claim about GMOs when all tomatoes are free of the ingredients that would met a standard definition of being genetically altered or modified.
The consumer, farming, and scientific communities have all taken to social media and squashed Hunt’s for the implication that their ingredients are free of GMOs, when it would be true for the entire market. The other issue at play here is that if they planned on changing their label to reflect a “non-GMO” status, that type of change to the packaging and label deck costs money, and it is usually passed along to the consumer in the form of a price increase.
The campaign has smacked so much of utilizing public fears over GMOs that some social media comments have consumers saying that they will be buying the competition’s products because of what Hunt’s tried to insinuate in this campaign.
It would be ridiculous if Heinz had to issue a campaign or a statement regarding the GMO status of their tomato based product lines. This is a case study for a marketing and advertising campaign that has gone totally sideways from the original intent because it was not thought all the way through. It was ill-advised by Hunt’s and it is definitely misleading to the consumer, but it was not in a malicious way.
The topic of GMOs is a hot button for many, myself included, and I have written my share of pieces on all sorts of topics relative to GMOs in the past. The article I did on Campbell’s Soup and their decision to disclose genetically modified ingredients on their individual product labels has certainly sparked a backlash against their products. I have witnessed it in the soup aisle and with the reaction of those people I know regarding their soup products.
In fairness to Campbell’s, as I noted in my prior article, the staple crops in making some of their soups: corn, soy, and sugar beet are sourced from the supplier as GMO containing ingredients. This is due to the supply chain of our staple crops containing GMOs or being grown with GMO seed. The amount of organic crops of those staple items is far too limited to sustain a mass production supply level and would also be very cost inefficient at this point.
The case of Campbell’s differs from Hunt’s because the ingredients involved in making soup do have non-GMO alternative sources, in the case of Hunt’s the product is already GMO free and they were trying to pass it off as it was a decision that they had consciously made about their products.
In the end analysis, honesty is always the best policy. Hunt’s would have been better served by focusing on the facts such as: “the tomato, GMO free and always will be” or “ketchup the naturally GMO free way to give flavor to your favorite food”. The tact they took has left them in a tough spot, they have to course correct this marketing campaign or else they will be left trying to figure out what to do with all those unsold bottles of ketchup which was GMO free in the first place.