MAHA’s Major Misstep: A Bite With Jeff Grogg, Managing Director of JPG Resources

The natural products industry was built on an ideal to make better-for-you food via innovation and clean ingredients. After last week’s Make America Health Again Commission released its inaugural report outlining the factors it believes contribute to rising chronic disease among children, the industry’s response has been a mixed bag.

We sat down with Jeff Grogg, managing director at JPG Resources, who has worked in food and beverage formulation for over 25 years, to discuss his take on how these findings were presented and where, as an industry, we go from here.

What was your reaction to how the report classifies Ultraprocessed Food (UPFs)?

I really hate the apparent reliance, or even reference, of the NOVA classification. Our natural food products industry, better-for-you industry, should hate that. I think our industry has our heads in the sand. If you’re making better-for-you foods, almost everything falls under UPF [per NOVA]. Better-for-you pizza, better-for-you nutrition bar, better-for-you cereal, it doesn’t matter, any of it, under NOVA, it all scores a four. [NOVA] doesn’t help our industry move people toward health.

The NOVA classification is one of the dumbest concepts to emerge in the last 30-40 years. It reminds me of the movement to remove fats from food and replace them with sugars. NOVA is a completely misguided framework that does not move the consumer or industry toward improving the nutritional quality of foods, and yet it is prominently featured in this report.

The other thing I think is an issue is a lot of the positioning in this document, particularly around diet, [indicates] a want to return to the halcyon days of 50 or 100 years ago of how people ate and cooked. Not once did it say anything about home-ec or teaching people to cook.

It also references these other countries – Italy, Portugal, France – but their relationship with food is culturally different. It’s not necessarily that they’re going to the store and buying healthier processed foods. They’re cooking at home or they’re walking more. There are these other societal impacts that we have to recognize, you’re not talking about a change to the food system, you’re talking about enormous consumer behavior change.

The solution, in my mind, is better processed foods, better packaged foods. This is America. This is how we live. Demonizing packaged foods here is not going to get you to a solution. There’s a huge disconnect in this idea of UPFs being bad, and particularly how the NOVA classification does it, and then [the push] to clean up the food supply. NOVA needs to go to. If we’re going to make progress on improving packaged goods, NOVA is the worst tool because there is no better-for-you optionality [under its definition].

How did you react to their focus on synthetic dyes?

This shift has been underway in the industry for some time. In our work with companies of all sizes, I can’t recall a time in our 16 years at JPG when we’ve used synthetic food dyes in a formulation. Modern food design, especially outside of confections, has moved away from these ingredients. While cleaning up legacy products is important a worthy goal, NOVA isn’t useful to drive this change as it would still recognize all these foods as Class 4 even after the change in colorant.

The report presented ultraprocessed grains, sugars and fats as key contributors to poor health. What do you make of that argument?

The first two items are well accepted: refined grains, refined sugar are generally known to be not that good for you. Those are uncontroversial. The oil piece, they’re a little in the scientific wilderness there. The whole seed oil debate – going back to lard and animal fats – there’s not a preponderance of evidence that says that’s the right way to go. The evidence around fats and oils is still evolving, and both the MAHA report and the anti-seed oil folks in our industry are front-running the science.

The sodium approach is interesting because the report says they don’t like the way FDA is focused on salt, it should be focused on UPF. Well, again, you’re in nonsense land. How it’s processed doesn’t really matter. What’s in it matters. This idea that we solve sodium by solving UPF – nobody knows what a UPF is.

Using NOVA, or just talking about UPF as highly processed, you’re creating this equivalency that a Froot Loop and Magic Spoon are the same thing, and they’re both bad for you. It makes no sense, and it will not reduce sodium use because it discourages trading up to BFY products. It’s not like that Froot Loop consumer is now going to have blueberries for breakfast instead. The NOVA logic demands changes beyond what consumers will do.

The report also points to corporate consolidation in the food industry as a contributor for the prevalence of UPFs. Do you believe there is a cause-and-effect there?

Everyone says UPF is coming for Big Food. This thinking is wrong and hurts the innovators and health-focused companies more because it puts the focus on processing and number of ingredients instead of the quality of ingredients and nutrition in the product.

Big Food all started small; everything started small. The soda companies started small. To say, well, Mountain Dew is bad because it’s Big Food. Well, Mountain Dew, at one point, was a startup, and it was basically the same thing it is today. It didn’t get worse because it got big. It was always that way.

There are plenty of small companies making foods that are not healthy or loaded with dyes and chemicals. Size isn’t the problem, and processing isn’t the problem. It’s the ingredients and nutritional profile that matter!

That said, I do think Big Ag poses some challenges, especially regarding subsidies and crop insurance. The report’s criticism of Big Ag is more valid, as it has contributed to some of the systemic issues in food production. However, much of the current food and ag landscape is a response to government policies and hopefully we can progress toward healthier food and planet with better policies.

Making companies good or bad based on how big they are does not make sense. When people demonize Big Food, a lot of times they’re looking at products that were designed 50 years ago. If you look at a lot of the newer stuff they’re putting out, and a lot of it is pretty clean, they reflect the modern environment of what consumers are looking for.

Scientific research and the validity of existing nutrition studies was called into question numerous times. What do you make of how this was presented?

The report seems to dismiss a wide range of studies, whether they come from government or industry sources. It’s unclear who they believe and why, which weakens their credibility. The idea that long-term, multi-factor studies would provide better insights is reasonable, but the complexity and costs associated with such research make it a difficult solution to implement. The hypothesis has some potential validity, but the cost and timeline make it unclear how this approach will lead to actionable outcomes.

Any final parting thoughts?

Our industry has become increasingly political, which has meant that there’s an unwillingness to accept anything from this administration as potentially good. But the report is pretty highly aligned with what our industry has been advocating for over decades. We should be happy that this report is moving us toward our industry wide goal, regardless of the source, and get over ourselves a little bit.