Michelle Obama Offers Her Support

Supporting Walmart for Healthy Family Foods
There are 310 million people in the United States. One quarter, or roughly 78 million are children. One in every three of them, or 23 million, are obese. Of those, all are susceptible to diabetes, and about one in three, or 10 million, will develop it. High blood pressure, cancer, asthma and heart disease are other risks they face. Doctors don’t use the word “epidemic” often, but they’re using it with childhood obesity. The problem is off the hook.

Big problems merit ambitious solutions. This one came straight from the White House. “We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation. We want our kids to face a different and more optimistic future in terms of their lifespan,” said First Lady Michelle Obama in a “Good Morning America” interview announcing the launch of her comprehensive initiative to combat childhood obesity, “Let’s Move!”

To achieve her goal, Obama’s turned to the private sector lobbying influential food companies for assistance. In January of this year, she found an unlikely ally, netting the biggest fish in America’s food distribution network — Walmart. The alliance was unlikely because the grocery food chain often found itself at odds with President Obama, who took the company to task for its low wages and poor benefits while he served in the Senate.

Now, however, inspired by the First Lady’s efforts with Let’s Move, Walmart’s launching a healthy foods initiative of its own — an initiative that addresses each of the obstacles in the path of Mrs. Obama’s efforts to fight childhood obesity.

“We applaud First Lady Michelle Obama’s leadership and commitment to this important cause. Few individuals have done more to raise awareness of the importance of healthier habits — especially among children — than she has. She was a catalyst that helped make today’s announcement a reality and her spirit of collaboration made our commitment to bring better nutrition to kitchen tables across this country even stronger,” said Walmart’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, Leslie Dach, at the unveiling of Walmart’s new plan.

When a solution to a problem requires the combined efforts of the White House and the world’s largest retailer, you have to wonder how it got that big that fast. The short answer: dramatic lifestyle changes over the past few decades. But socioeconomic changes have played a big part, as well.

Whenever the topic comes up, the First Lady likes to go to the obvious reason first. Kids are not as active — not nearly — as they used to be. They used to play outdoors more often, running, climbing, jumping, burning off calories like crazy. Those activities have been replaced by video games, the Internet, too much TV and a host of other sedentary activities.

The trickier element in the equation is poor nutrition. We (and our kids) eat far more fast food than we used to. Kids snack more than they used to, and they’re not snacking on carrots? What goes better with TV than a can of potato chips? Kids drink more soda today than ever before. A couple of Big Gulps a day and a kid’s had almost 100 ounces of sweetened soda. Make no mistake about it: sugar-sweetened drinks = fat. Even when kids have access to good food, they’re not eating it. It doesn’t fit into their lifestyles. Some changes need to be made.

There are, however, more fatal forces at work. There are plenty of kids that can’t even lay hands on good food. There are, in the words of First Lady Michelle Obama, simply areas lacking access to grocery stores. Areas where it’s easier to find a Big Mac than a banana, where many families are forced to shop for groceries at convenience stores, which are expensive and don’t really sport business models built around healthy eating.

Children living in food deserts have a higher proportion of type 2 diabetes. What little food that can be found in those areas is nutritionally shallow. A steady diet of it leads to a number of health problems, type 2 diabetes among them.

In other words, families can’t get to the food, they don’t know the good from the bad, and when they find the good stuff, they can’t afford it. There are a lot of kids locked into a lifestyle of obesity by these three obstacles. And this is where Walmart wants to help.

The doors of Walmart swing wide for 140 million shoppers each week. That’s 150 times the population of Tulsa and Oklahoma City combined. The retail giant is the undisputed leader of food and grocery sales in the U.S., and most of the food that finds its way to dining room tables across the country comes from Walmart. It doesn’t make the market — it is the market.

With its new five-point health initiative, Walmart hopes to use its considerable market power to address all three of the above issues. It’s already begun to work the problem of “food deserts,” those areas the First Lady described as places where it’s easier to find a Big Mac than a banana. You can’t eat what you can’t find. Walmart’s new program explicitly addresses food deserts, with the company pledging to build new stores in areas — urban and rural — where none are currently available.

Walmart has already begun construction on two new stores in inner city Chicago, both areas currently being picture-perfect food deserts.“Mayor Daley has been a champion of economic development in the city and his support of Walmart through the years has allowed us the opportunity to do what we do best: open stores that create jobs and offer a broad assortment of products at everyday low prices,” said Julie Murphy, Senior Vice President, Walmart U.S. “Moving forward, we will continue to identify sites in Chicago’s food deserts, while also looking for opportunities to help even more Chicagoans save money and live better.” The company’s made similar pledges for other inner city — and rural — areas.

“Our goal is ambitious,” the First Lady says. “It’s to eliminate food deserts in America completely in seven years.” But just having a supermarket instead of a convenience store available won’t solve the problem.

The right foods need to be on the shelves and they need to be affordable. Another plank in Walmart’s campaign addresses that problem. Starting with its in-house brand, Great Value, the company will dramatically reduce sodium and sugar content and completely eliminate trans fats, offering an affordable array of healthier food items at price points comparable to those of less healthy items.

“What you really have to look at is what’s happening in our country and it really comes down to one basic truth: and the fact is that healthier eating — and I think it’s a goal we all share — is really, really hard to do given the lifestyles that we live today,” said Bill Simon, Walmart’s CEO. Simon wants, literally, to change our food to match our busy, on-the-go lifestyles. But changing “our food” doesn’t just mean making Walmart’s food healthier. It means making every supplier’s food healthier.

Walmart will be working with other food suppliers to improve the nutritional content of food sold under larger, national brands. Critics of the superstore have long bemoaned its coercive tactics, using its volume buying to squeeze producer profit margins or change the way suppliers do business. Make no mistake about it. Walmart’s teeing up another round of coercion — but this time it’s for a good cause. It’s easy to justify.

Remember those 140 million visits a week? Suppliers that want a piece of that are going to have to play ball. But it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal when you put it this way: if Walmart can reduce the amount of sodium in its ketchup and stay competitive with its pricing, why can’t giants like Heinz and Hunts do the same. Regardless, they’re going to have to figure it out. How well will their ketchup sell when its sitting on a shelf next to a less expensive, healthier bottle that says “Great Value” on it?

Having access to better and more affordable food is crucial, but it’s useless if consumers, particularly those used to every dinner coming with a toy, don’t know how to spot it. Walmart’s making a huge change to take the a lot of the guesswork out of eating healthy.

No longer will shoppers have to pick up the box (or bottle), flip it around and wade through a small sea of information about the contents in the food it holds? Eight essential vitamins and minerals? Maybe. How can you hold the food producer accountable to this statement unless you want to go deep on that label?

Walmart wants to create a short version of the label, including only the important ingredients, and put it on the front of the packaging. A quick glance from shoppers, it hopes, is all that’s needed to make good nutrition decisions.

Michelle Obama Visiting School Lunch Programs

“This Nutrition Charter promises a real change that can have a fundamental impact in how our kids eat, you see, because when parents have the information they need about the products they buy, that puts them back in charge, so they can make good decisions for their families,” said the First Lady.

The contents of the new “seal of approval” are still being discussed and debated. For instance, items listed on the seals will have to change from food product to food product. The seal will sit next to other product labels such as “diet” or “No MSG.” But Walmart has assured skeptics it will be easily identifiable.

This will probably turn out to be another case of Walmart changing the food business. Unlabeled products, especially those with national brands, will look a little sketchy if they’re sitting on shelves next to products that clearly and transparently announce their ingredients. If two products cost about the same amount of money and one loudly pronounces itself as a healthy addition to a meal, there’s little doubt which one the consumer will reach for.

The most exciting move by Walmart, and the one most readily praised by nutrition experts, is the chain’s newly announced commitment to bringing down the price of fresh produce — in new stores in the middle of food deserts.

No food is as nutritionally dense as fresh produce. The closer to the earth you eat, the healthier you’ll be. Produce, more than any other type of food, is unobtainable in food deserts. Ever seen cauliflower in a 7-11?

But even if it were available in convenience stores, that cauliflower would be out of reach for low-income consumers. It’s expensive to bring fresh fruits and produce to market and that expense shows up in the price. Budgets only stretch so far and it’s just a fact — frozen green beans are cheaper than fresh ones. Walmart’s goal: make it less expensive to get the good stuff and save consumers more than $1 billion per year on it.

The importance of Michelle Obama’s endorsement of Walmart’s Healthy Foods Initiative can’t be ignored. She’s put the credibility of her own initiative, Let’s Move! on the line. But if Walmart’s plan works, she’ll be a lot closer to meeting her goals of wiping out food deserts in seven years and childhood obesity in a generation.