• Washington Post, Tuesday, April 7, 2009 11:15 AM

Health advocates have long steered Americans away from processed foods that contain dozens of unnatural and unpronounceable ingredients, Jan Black writes. The message may be getting through, as the growth of organic and "natural" products would indicate. The message hasn't escaped marketers' attention, of course. In fact, they're turning "simplicity sells" into a strategy.

For example, every ingredient of the vanilla version of Five, Haagen-Dazs's new line of ice cream, is prominently displayed in bright-orange capital letters. The fact that the brand's regular vanilla bean ice cream also has just five ingredients is beside the point. Snapple has launched a reformulated line of drinks with a campaign emphasizing that its iced teas are made from green and black tea and "real" sugar. Frito-Lay is boasting that its potato chips, tortilla chips and even Fritos are each made with just three ingredients.

"It's a convergence of health, food safety, taste and traceability," says food and consumer behavior analyst Phil Lempert. "People are reading labels more carefully than they were previously. When they pick up a product and it has 30 ingredients and they don't know what half of them are, they are putting it back on the shelves."

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