Food trends: Will ‘low-G’ muscle out ‘low-C’?

"Low-carb” is gone. So what comes next? The “low-G” trend?

U.S. food companies slow to respond to the low-carb craze would love to know as they deal with new diet products that may quickly become passe and ponder a new term - the glycemic index - which has already made a mark elsewhere.

“The G-word replaces the C-word,” said Lynn Dornblaser of UK-based market research firm Mintel International Group Ltd., as she laid out to a consumer goods conference in Miami some likely trends for the food industry in the coming year.

Mintel research shows that the launch of new low-carb products peaked in the middle of last year. “And they are starting to fail,” Dornblaser told Reuters. “In six to 12 months, watch for them to start dropping off the market.”

According to data from ACNielsen LabelTrends, sales of “carb conscious” products by U.S. merchandisers, excluding Wal-Mart Stores Inc., fell 10.5 percent to $531 million in the fourth quarter of 2004, compared to the previous quarter.

That is also borne out by companies.

“The peak (of the low-carb fad) is well behind us,” Ramin Eivaz, vice president of business intelligence and customer insights at PepsiCo Inc., said on Tuesday.

“But health and wellness is not,” Eivaz told Reuters at the conference on the retail and consumer packaged goods sectors.

Some trend watchers say the likely new trend for the United States, which could have an impact on food and drink producers, is the “low-G” index already popular in Australia, where it began, and in Europe - if consumers can get their heads around the word “glycemic.”

The glycemic index measures how efficiently the body can metabolize carbohydrates. It ranks carbohydrates by how much a person’s blood sugar rises immediately after eating, and would tend to favor high-fiber foods that take longer to digest.

Food products that tend to have a high glycemic index include white bread, mashed potatoes and cereals, while those with a low index include potato salad, pasta, oatmeal, legumes and whole-grain breads.

It also fits in with a growing preoccupation among consumers in the developed world over the spread of diabetes, and prediabetic conditions.

U.S. nutritionists do not appear to have bought into the low-glycemic trend to the same extent as colleagues in Europe and Australia, in part because the measure is not as easy to explain, or use, as other guidelines for healthy eating.

But that could change once the U.S. government publishes a new food pyramid, an influential guide to what mix of foods the average American should have on their plates, said Dornblaser.

The new pyramid is expected to be made public this month, and to reflect changes in dietary guidelines given by the U.S. government in January in which Americans were urged to eat more vegetables, fruits and whole grains.

Scott Klein, chief executive of market data firm Information Resources Inc., which hosted the Miami conference, said if low-glycemic turned out to be the next big thing, food manufacturers will want to get in on the act quickly.

“What they regret is that they didn’t adjust to low-carb faster,” Klein said.

But in an ever-faster moving marketplace, it’s hard to predict whether a new fashion may be over before products developed to meet the trend have reached consumers.

“The question is, how quickly do you jump into something that might turn out to be a fad?” said Dornblaser.

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