Advertising And Food Advertising In The Food Industry

Food Advertising In today’s society, magazine and newspaper advertisements are seen everywhere. Whether the topic of the advertisement is a car or the newest brand of shoes, all advertisements share the same goal. That goal is to draw the viewer’s attention and convince the viewer that they need the product that is being shown. The food industry is very well known for their use of advertisements. Food companies in the United States spend billions of dollars each year creating ads to promote their products. Every part of any advertisement has a purpose and each company uses different strategies in their advertisements to convey their message to potential consumers. One common strategy of the advertisements is to claim that the food is healthy

In many cases if a person can get a product for very cheap, they are more likely to buy the product. This is no different for food. The Wendy’s advertisement that I had found is a perfect example of this strategy. In this ad, Wendy’s was advertising their new “4 for $4” menu option (Appendix B). In the meal, the customer would receive a hamburger, fries, chicken nuggets and a drink. Another company that advertises their cheap prices is McDonald’s. The particular advertisement that I found was for their Filet-o-Fish sandwich that only costs two dollars (Appendix B). The advertising of cheap food is just helping the cheap food revolution. I think an interesting aspect of this advertising technique was that both examples that I found were fast food restaurants. Fast food restaurants are known for their fairly cheap food and make sure that consumers realize this. The cheap prices are a good selling point for fast food restaurants though. When the prices are so low for certain products, a wide variety of people can purchase the food. It opens up a wide variety of customers which makes the restaurants so popular in today’s

Food in America, in particular is cheaper than almost anywhere else. As the writer Bryan Walsh from TIME explained, this is because the price of corn has decreased immensely allowing buyers to make food cheap (Thompson). So, if fast food is so cheap, what about the healthier options? Healthier options have actually become more expensive. “A dollar today buys 1,200 calories of potato chips and 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories from fresh fruit,” (Thompson). The food options in fast food generally are also over portioned, high in fat, carbs, and sodium. When customers choose to eat the meals because of how cheap the meals are, they are demonstrating the eating style that is becoming more and more relevant in today’s society. This eating style is gastro-anomie. Gastro-anomie is the “condition of unsatisfying, meaningless eating of foods, and the loss of pleasure to be gained from food,” (Eating Culture). In many cases, advertisers do not tell customers about the poor quality of their food, but rather encourage the customers to buy the food for how cheap the products