Tearing Down a Brand

It feels like a million years ago that I used to work in advertising.  I even got to work for a few ice cream brands (for the sake of full disclosure: brand 1, brand 2 and brand 3).

Once I was on a brand retreat with one of the ice cream clients, and they were doing a blind tasting.  The client’s brand was “Brand A” and Breyer’s was “Brand B”.  Would you believe I was the only one in the room who claimed to prefer the competition?

The rest of the retreat was a bit rough, but I kept my job.

Honestly, I’ve always liked Breyer’s ice cream.  Sure, it’s not as thick, rich and creamy as its competitors.  But sometimes one wants ice cream to be light and refreshing.  No?  Especially if you are using it to top an already thick and rich dessert, like a fudgy brownie or a hot caramelized apple pie.

Plus, I have a soft spot for their old commercials.  They appeal to my very current sense of what food should be: minimally processed, with real ingredients, and not too many of them.

Here’s an old spot (circa 1984, if you believe the internets).

I hope you watched the spot.  If you caught a glimpse of the comments, you probably have a sense where this is going.

Breyer’s, the great all-natural ice cream that prided itself on having just four ingredients, and chided locust beans (a thickening agent derived from natural sources) is now using tara gum (a thickening agent derived from natural sources).

If you do even just the most cursory bit of digging into tara gum on Wikipedia, you will find that it is more viscous than the maligned locust beans from the old commercial.

Even the high quality Haagen-Dazs is making a big deal about their five-ingredient flavors.  But back in the day Breyer’s was able to do it with just four.

Old ingredients (from spot): pure milk, fresh cream, sugar and strawberries.
New ingredients (from site): Milk, strawberries, sugar, cream, whey, natural tara gum.

So, we have this strong brand that encouraged its consumers to read the labels and to be suspicious of things like gums in the ice cream.  Flash forward (pleases don’t make me say twenty-five years) and that very same brand is pumping their product up with a virtually identical substance.

You may also notice the addition of whey, which sounds very Little Miss Muffet.  But the FDA explains that it is for use under the category of “Stabilizers and Thickeners, Binders, Texturizers.” And savvy vegetarians will know that whey is a byproduct of the cheese-making process, and will likely come from cheese made with animal-based rennet (unless otherwise noted.)

But I also encourage you to look at the difference in the order of ingredients.  See how cream has been demoted to the fourth ingredient from the second.  To me this is just as critical as the insertion of gums into the product.

In fact, to my mind, this is the true reason for the addition of gum: to increase profitability by lowering the cost of ingredients.  Butterfat is expensive.  Gums are cheap.  When you buy ice cream, it should be ice cream.

And the truth be told, there are tons of regulations regarding what can be labeled as ice cream.  But they don’t seem to be helping, do they?

It is a real shame when a brand that was built upon the promise of four kitchen-cabinet ingredients reneges on that promise.  Especially since many of its loyal and trusting consumers probably stopped reading the Breyer’s ingredients labels long ago.

Can I get a harumpf?

Just do not forget what the Breyer’s ice cream ad taught us all those years ago: Read the ingredients of your food.  And don’t forget to check for ingredients, even on products that you wouldn’t suspect to have any.