How Food Marketing Is Reinforcing Bad Habits

The ugly truth about nighttime snacking.

You just finished getting ready for bed. You walk into your bedroom and there’s an unwanted visitor.

The Big Food Monster.

“What’re you doing here?” you ask.

“It’s time for a nighttime snack.”

“But I’m not hungry.”

“It’ll help you sleep and lose weight,” the monster says.

So, you trust the monster and munch on some snacks.

Tomorrow the monster returns.

They offer you more snacks.

You eat them and go to bed.

The monster shows up every day for the next week.

Then month.

You’re now 20 pounds heavier, physically exhausted, and your brain feels eternally foggy. What the heck happened?

The birth of the nighttime snack category.

And you fell right for the Big Food Monster’s trap.

Eating before bed is one of the most unhealthy habits you can develop. Yet 80% of Americans snack regularly at night and $50 billion is spent on nighttime snacks per year.

What of it?

Big Food is starting to notice and it wants to capture a piece of that $50 billion.

• Kellogg’s CEO Steven Cahillane says “Breakfast is a key occasion, but so is late-night snacking.”

• Nestle’s Director of New Business Ventures says “People are looking to replace some of their junk foods before they go to sleep with something that is a little better.”

• Mondalez’s CEO Dirk Van de Put says “So some of the learnings we have is that the same consumer might eat very healthy in the morning but very indulgent at night depending on how they’re feeling.”

The Big Food Monster clearly sees the nighttime snack category as an opportunity. However, there seems to be one company that is leading the charge; nightfood.

nightfood is a company “tackling America’s $50B nighttime snacking problem” by pioneering the nighttime food category.

I don’t really understand that.

In what world does solving a problem involve creating a product that enables the behavior that is driving the problem in the first place?

It’s just twisted.

If nighttime snacking is an issue, how does pioneering a new food category, creating products to fill that category, and then selling those products to consumers who are already snacking at night going to solve the problem?

It won’t.

But it seems like consumers will believe anything nowadays; which is surprising because we all carry supercomputers in our pockets all day where we have all of life’s answers at our fingertips.

What’s concerning is that big companies with big marketing dollars can do big manipulation with the right message and story. And that’s exactly what the company nightfood is doing, and the Big Food Monster will likely pull the same shenanigans.

In this post, I’ll share five deceptive tactics and claims about nighttime snacking that will drive the category forward.

1 - Good for your sleep.

nightfood’s tagline is “what you eat before bed matters.” And guess what? They’re right!

Nobody should be eating anything before bed!

Eating before bed leads to poor sleep, slower metabolism, indigestion, and heartburn.

nightfood also advertises that its products are “Formulated by sleep experts” and are “sleep friendly.” I spent a year writing about sleep technology. There is not one “sleep expert” who will claim eating before bed is good for your sleep.

Maybe nightfood doesn’t explicitly say that its products will help improve your sleep, but if they are using sleep experts as a way to advertise its products, most consumers will look at that and think “Oh! This will help me sleep better!”

Eating at night is one of the major drivers of poor sleep. And here is a company marketing food as good for sleep! They even have sleep experts endorsing it!

Maybe their products are better than the ordinary ice cream and cookies someone might eat before bed, but eating nothing before bed is 100% better for your sleep than choosing to eat this junk!

It’s straight-up deception.

2 - Satisfy your cravings.

nightfood tells a story about how “Humans are biologically hardwired to crave excess survival calories” at night. They might be right, however, if humans were to eat a protein-dense dinner coming from real food sources, I guarantee they wouldn’t experience the same cravings at night.

This “survival calorie” story makes nighttime snackers feel good about their decision to eat 1,000 calories worth of Oreos at midnight. It makes them feel like everyone is like them.

Yes, 80% of consumers snack at night, but that doesn’t make it right, healthy, or a good choice for your sleep.

3 - Better than ice cream and cookies.

Most consumers know they should not be eating ice cream and cookies before bed. So when the market positions a category of products for a “healthier” alternative, obviously they are going to jump on it. People want to be healthy.

But eating at night is not healthy. And using the “better than ice cream and cookies” story is maniacal. If nighttime really wanted to solve the $50B nighttime snacking problem, they would not be positioning a product to capture the night snacking market share, they’d be promoting not eating nighttime snacks in the first place.

nightfood isn’t a solution. It’s a bandaid. Yet their marketing makes it seem like it’s curing world hunger.

4 - Wrapping unhealthy in healthy.

Over 80% of Americans snack regularly at night, resulting in an estimated 700 million nighttime snack occasions weekly, and $50B spent on night snacks per year. Yet it’s one of the worst things you can do for your health, increasing your risk of weight gain and poor sleep; both of which are strongly correlated to heart disease and diabetes.

But the Big Food Monster doesn’t care. It just wants a piece of that $50B. So what does it do?

Wrap something unhealthy, in something healthy.

So, they take the $50B nighttime snack market and mash it with the $12B rapidly growing sleep industry. And voila; a story where nighttime snacking helps you sleep.

5 - The healthier alternative.

Pioneering the nighttime snacking category is dependent on marketing bad choices to an audience of people who are already making unhealthy choices. It’s like marketing a Juul as a healthier alternative to someone smoking cigarettes. They’re both bad for you, yet one is marketed as a healthier alternative.

For example, let me introduce you to Marty.

Marty is trying to lose weight. One of the reasons he is so overweight is that he eats 1,000 calories after dinner every night. Marty starts doing some research and learns about some new nighttime snacks that are supposed to be healthier than the ice cream he’s been eating at night.

The new nighttime snacks are only 500 calories as opposed to the 1,000 calories he usually eats. So Marty buys the new nighttime snack and starts eating that at night instead.

Three weeks pass.

Marty is still gaining weight. He doesn’t understand why. He thought he was making a healthier decision!

Little did Marty know that it wasn’t what he was eating at night that was resulting in his weight gain. It was that he was eating something at all. What Marty needs to do was stop snacking at night altogether. But he fell for the Big Food Monster’s dirty tricks and chose the “healthy alternative” instead.

The Big Food Monster is out to get us. And its marketing tactics are clever and deceptive. The nighttime snacking category is coming and most consumers will fall for the monster’s tricks.

With great marketing, any company can make it seem like its products are good for you. The growth of the nighttime snacking category is dependent on deception and driven by greed. And if no one says anything about it, the Big Food Monster will keep growing bigger, while consumers keep getting sicker and sicker.