McDonald’s Packaging Promotes Better Health…If Used Properly

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Now here’s the most interesting tid-bit I’ve read in a long time. A research report from The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine has concluded that kids think food wrapped in McDonald’s packaging tastes better than the identical food NOT packaged in McDonald’s wraps.

BrandWeek wrote an article last week about how kids react to familiar brands and they prefer food presented in a McDonald’s wrapper…no matter what the food is.

According to the report, three to five year olds strongly preferred food presented in the familiar fast-food packaging. Diane Levin, a childhood development specialist who campaigns against advertising to kids, told the AP “You see a McDonald’s label and kids start salivating.”

Okay, now that much I can buy easily. In fact, it’s more or less what most of us already knew… but what I didn’t do was evolve my thinking beyond generalizing that a McDonald’s hamburger is what was making the kids… salivate. The real gem of insight is that kids will be interested in anything wrapped up by Ronald’s army of teenage employees.

But then I thought about it some more… and I recalled the first time I saw Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me.

Sure the movie’s about the heinous things a 30-day diet of nothing but McDonald’s will eventually do to your body, but for the first 15 minutes of that movie…everytime Morgan would start noshing on a burger or fries…damn, I kind of became Homer Simpson incarnate…I could literally read the cartoon bubble above my head that was slurring out something like “mmmmmm burgers…where the hell is the closest McDonald’s?!”

Hmmmmm… well, back to the point. CNN carried the research findings as well but expounding a more causal correlation (not casual, but causal). The author argued that “preschoolers said anything made by McDonald’s tastes better in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.”

Here’s where I am starting to draw the line though. I’m not so sure you can pinpoint the cause and effect as spurriously as the CNN article deduces—advertising as trickery. To me it seems more like more basic psychology. For example, kids are often trained (for lack of a better word) by their parents to see McDonald’s (et al) as a special treat.

Or put another way, it’s like reverse psychology and the parents’ attempts at limiting kids’ exposure to fast food…or soft drinks… or whatever “it” was in your family…in fact, my family (read: my mom) had a problem with serving us sugared cereals. We had this big disgusting pillow-sized bag of unsweetened puffed wheat in our pantry closet.

However… it was on camping trips (and only camping trips) that mom would pull out that multi-pack of miniature cereal boxes… and of course, you and your sisters would fight, scrap and cry over who gets the Sugar Corn Pops (since renamed as Corn Pops) and who got jammed with Apple Jacks (or as we called them “Crapple Jacks”)… oh and the selection of cereal wasn’t even the half of it. Mini box in hand was one thing; then you’d struggle with the blunt end of your spoon to try to cut that ridiculous “H”-shaped pattern they so helpfully outlined with a dotted line… sawing awkwardly through the cardboard… and then more dysfunctionally through a layer of waxed paper… all the while crushing the cereal into a fine sweet grain powder… and then… perhaps 10 minutes later, you find the soggy milk carton that’s been jammed into the corner of a tepid cooler with 3 inches of dirty water and 5 packs of hot dogs and a couple 6ers of cheap beer… and then you’d pour the lukewarm milk into the box…. which now resembles little more than a torn and weathered boxette… and hope to hell it didn’t leak. Camping sure was fun.

Okay, so back to the report, the study’s author Dr. Tom Robinson said the kids’ perception of taste was “physically altered by the branding.” The Stanford University researcher said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising. This is where have a question for him. To me, the kids who haven’t eaten McDonald’s probably wouldn’t have any such preferences despite the fact they may have seen the ads….at least that’s what I’m wondering. If we don’t have a frame of reference experiencing the food, do the ads still work by shear force of familiarity?

Furthermore, even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches. Well, this sounds like something we all learned in economics where scarcity can dictate demand. Things kids love are held back in supply (scarcity) and the result is that we demand more and will do anything for it. Might be a stretch, but I’m searching for a way to not blame advertising for this whole thing since fifty-four percent of the kids preferred McDonald’s-wrapped carrots versus 23 percent who liked the plain-wrapped sample.

So what do we do now… First, let’s give McDonald’s some credit for getting kids to eat iceberg lettuce that the Big Mac contains. That’s a vegetable! Oh, and is ketchup considered a fruit? Kids seem to like the burgers with ketchup.

I guess there’s at least one new thing that might work. Maybe McDonald’s should just sell empty food wrappers that parents can take home and wrap their kids’ food in… because we all know moms should be feeding their kids those healthy Oscar Mayer pizza Lunchable things… right?. Could McDonald’s make money competing with Saran Wrap, Reynolds Wrap and Glad Bags?

McDonald’s selling unused wrappers for parents…yep, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it… Plus, I’ve been dying to use this image again

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