How to eat well: Beware brand extension

In the age of the savvy consumer, brands offer a shorthand way of knowing what you are buying. Familiarity allows us to make a quick decision to purchase based on what we understand about the brand’s values, such as quality, consistency, provenance or history.

Whatever it might be, the brand owners know this and understandably use it to their advantage. This is often through brand extension, when a manufacturer creates a new product and allows its existing, popular brand effectively to approve of it.

Food companies do this a lot. Innocent for example, is known for its smoothies and used them to lend instant credibility to its new range of ready-meals.

But when it comes to health, brand extension isn’t always quite so clear. This is typified by the explosion in the number of cereal bars that crowd the shelves of every type of food shop, from supermarket to corner store.
Those based on well-known breakfast cereals are the ones that concern me. In some cases, the brand owners have relied on the power of the original product to divert attention away from the properties of the new one. One of the best known is based on a low-calorie breakfast cereal. The original does what it says on the pack, but the extended family includes other cereals and snacks that might well be low in calorie, but contain 36g of sugar per 100g. Not quite so healthy perhaps, but when blessed with the power of the original brand, it has shelf appeal.