Sugar Puffs get rebranded – but what’s really different?

Sugar Puffs are set to be renamed, and their sugar content scaled back, after sales plummet.

How do you market a product called Sugar Puffs at a time when negative attitudes to sugar are on the rise?

That’s a question that has clearly vexed Halo Foods, owners of the product, who have decided that the answer is a rebrand.

Reports indicate that sales were down 16.6% by value and 21.6% by volume in recent years. By cutting Sugar from the name, Halo hopes to convince customers to come back.

Honey Monster still standing

Sticking by their long-lived mascot Honey Monster, the company will be renaming its cereal 'Honey Monster Puffs', placing more emphasis on honey as an ingredient. And, to be fair, 20% more honey is included than in the previous recipe.

The new box will be in stores from 3rd November and has had the word 'sugar' removed completely. The current boxes (pictured left) have already minimised the space the word 'sugar' takes up on the box.

The box will also be marked with a traffic light label, so that it clearly displays the amount of sugar contained, which still constitutes 10% of a person’s RDA at 8.6g per 30g serving. They are still sweetened with both honey and sugar. Since the constituents of the recipe are much the same, I feel that calling it a ‘brand new’ product is a bit of a stretch.

While I have to give some credit to the fact that the company has agreed to a level of transparency by adopting the traffic light system, their marketing still relies (now that he’s in the name, more than ever) on the existence of a character whose main appeal is to children, whose so-called ‘pester power’ can be incredibly influential on parents’ decisions.

And while there’s nothing wrong with a very occasional treat at breakfast time, Honey Monster Puffs as a ‘healthier’ option seems to be no more convincing than Coca-Cola Life, which was introduced to the UK last month.

A sugar revolution?

Public Health England outlined their plan to help everyone in the country reduce their intake of sugar in June, in a paper titled ‘Sugar reduction: responding to the challenge’.

The cost of diet and obesity related diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and some cancers, cost the NHS £11 billion a year, according to research from 2011. Then there's the emotional cost to the people affected by such diseases, their families and their friends.

Since 1991, sugar intakes in children under 11 have fallen, but comparative studies in 2008/2010 and 2010/2012 showed “no evidence of a further fall”, indicating that, at some point, the reduction levelled out.

The future of sugar

Sugar isn’t on its way out, and will never be completely removed from our diets, but I think that a lot of people are quickly becoming more aware of what’s in the food they eat and parents are worried about how food is represented to their children. The fall in sales of Sugar Puffs is indicative of that.

Action On Junk Food Marketing hit the news once again in March with its argument that there should be a 9pm watershed for junk food ads, while Ofcom rules banning adverts for foods high in salt, fat and sugar during children’s television programmes came into force back in 2008.

While calls for more restrictions continue, the real change needs to happen from within the industry as a response to public demand. After all, there’s no way to protect anyone, of any age, walking down the street and seeing an advert on a billboard, a flyer, or on the side of a bus.

What do we really need?

Name alterations and ‘reformulations’ don’t constitute real change. They pander to public concerns without offering a true alternative.

The current trend of lower-sugar products is only a tiny shuffle in the right direction. Independent think tank 2020health called for a permanent Government task force to tackle our obesity problem last week in a new report, with Chief Executive Julia Manning saying that “piecemeal solutions have been tried in the past and shown to be inadequate.”

In my opinion, the piecemeal solution of reducing the sugar in foods that were already very high in sugar is simply not effective, as they still have a very high sugar content even after the reduction.

Manning also cited research undertaken by the group which showed that “hand-in-hand with obesity is widespread confusion over what constitutes healthy eating, and also a rise in malnutrition.” Food labelling can cause part of that confusion, as shown by research. For example, if a product is ‘lower in sugar’ than a previous recipe, that does not necessarily mean that it is a ‘low-sugar’ product, but it may give that impression.

What we need is a marketplace where there is a place for sugary foods, but one in which they aren’t be intensely marketed or allowed to exploit pester power to guarantee sales. Regulations need to put in place to stop high-sugar and high-fat products being marketed so aggressively, and to stop people being potentially misled by packaging and marketing efforts.

What do you think the solution is? Can customer demand ever cause companies to make real changes to their products, rather than token alterations? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.

You might also like:

Introducing Coca-Cola Life: the new 'healthy' coke drink

Is our 'traffic light' food labelling really too simplistic?

Why we shouldn't have warning labels on booze