America’s food and beverage makers, in tandem with casual restaurants including Burger King, have stepped up their marketing offensive against federal regulators who are seeking to impose tough new “voluntary” standards about marketing to children.

Industry groups are intensifying their battle on two fronts: extending more effort on self-governing programs to offer more healthy-product options and to soft-pedal their marketing, and punching back harder against the proposal by the Obama administration’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on marketing food to children.Continue reading...

And here we thought Yahoo's Carol Bartz was a pioneer among female CEOs using salty language.

Only, Denise Morrison isn't yet CEO of the Campbell Soup Company — she moves into the C-suite on August 1st — and she isn't hurling expletives, but addressing the issue of actual salt: as in, exactly how much salt do Campbell’s customers want in their soups, and in which soups?

As president of Campbell USA, Morrison, who is taking over from CEO Doug Conant, was one of the company’s biggest proponents of its healthy eating commitment and full-court sodium-reduction strategy of the last few years.

That gained Campbell some props from food activists and gave the company lots of “new and improved” products to market on a better-for-you basis. But it hasn’t done a lot for sales: Campbell reported a 7% decline in soup revenue for the quarter that ended May 1st.Continue reading...

Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages (PCNAB) is in the 'hood, the South Bronx hood to be precise, teaming up with New Yorkers like Grammy Award producer, rapper, and artist Swizz Beatz, graffiti artist Cope 2, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and Assemblyman Carl Heastie, all gathered in support of healthier lifestyle choices.

Activities held today at THE POINT include:

• Sampling stations with Aquafina, Diet Sierra Mist, SoBe Lifewater and Pepsi MAX
• Cooking demonstrations from City Harvest highlighting healthy summer recipes
• Live art installations by Swizz Beatz, with parents, students and faculty from The Bronx Charter School for the Arts and Cope 2.

"Being a father and also being involved with The Bronx Charter School for the Arts, I understand even more how important it is to stay healthy," said Beatz (who's now a proud papa to a son with partner Alicia Keys) in a release. "The Bronx Flavor initiative shows Pepsi-Cola North America's commitment to the well-being of our community."Continue reading...

Talk about a Rocky Mountain High. Colorado has allowed the use of medical marijuana since 2000, but usage really went up after the U.S. Attorney General's office said in 2009 that it “would not prosecute marijuana users if their state permits use of the drug for medical reasons,” NPR reports.

As a result, Denver’s weekly alternative newspaper, Westword, has hired its first official marijuana critic, a reviewer who uses the pseudonym William Breathes (a chap who isn't adverse to writing puff pieces, clearly).

"We have more than 100,000 licensed medical marijuana cardholders in the state," Breathes told NPR. There are now actually more marijuana dispensaries —more than 300 — in the Mile High City than there are Starbucks locations.Continue reading...

New York's upscale burger stand Shake Shack’s recently expanded to Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. The other day, it got a surprise visit from the First Lady, Michelle Obama, who has made fighting childhood obesity her major battleground during her husband’s presidency.

The Washington Post reports that Obama ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake, and a Diet Coke, which adds up to 1,700 calories of intake. Gasp!Continue reading...

Starbucks has noticed that more and more consumers are watching what they eat, so the company has just introduced Bistro Boxes.

The small meals (Chipotle Chicken Wraps, Sesame Noodles, etc. ) are designed to be healthier — under 500 calories and less than $7 a pop, as noted by USA Today — while giving customers a non-caffeinated reason to come back, and increasingly associate Starbucks with food.

On the iced coffee front, however, the vendor is going the other direction, finally rolling out the promised jumbo size, the Trenta, that is 11 ounces bigger than its previous “large” size, the Venti.

Following a limited market test the Trenta is debuting today in Chicago and the northeastern US, including Boston. “I don’t know if it’s too much coffee, but I’ll know in about an hour when I’m shaking,” commented one male customer to the Boston Herald.

And the company isn’t just growing its cup sizes. It’s also looking to grow internationally — why stop at domestic dominance?Continue reading...

On the day that the Obama administration had to ruefully acknowledge that the unemployment rate is rising again – to 9.2% in June – the US Association of National Advertisers tried a clever tactic that attempted to leverage renewed fears about joblessness to advance what probably ranks as the ANA’s No. 1 public-policy concern these days.

The ANA produced a study purporting to show that a cross-agency federal proposal to curtail marketing of certain products to kids could translate to the loss of at least 74,000 American jobs in the retailing, marketing and manufacturing of foods and beverages that the government believes contribute to childhood obesity.Continue reading...

US cigarette manufacturers haven’t had to start selling the nine new pack designs that include nasty warning labels with images of rotting teeth, corpses, diseased lungs, and other such things on them but a new report will give them some hope.

The FDA requires that the new pack designs be sold starting in the fall of 2012, but a new report predicts that there won't be an immediate impact for Big Tobacco.Continue reading...