Food CSR: Goodbye salt, my favorite flavor

CSR is a careful, interesting dance between firms, regulators and consumers. When firms fail to regulate themselves, or to do so sufficiently, regulators shift what was once voluntary into mandatory rules. This tacit understanding is evident in the FDA/ New York City's new CSR experiment, asking food companies nicely to voluntarily cut back on salt in their food products before issuing regulations to force them to. If the food industry cuts back enough, it may evade regulation, which is in everyone's best interest; the government doesn't want to spend money to regulate firms causing harm, taxpayers don't want to pay for it either, and no firm wants to be regulated. So corporate America… the gauntlet is down. Whether regulations are issued or not all relies on the firms themselves. And in response to the FDA's request for voluntary cutbacks on salt, some firms have replied with major commitments, which is great. But which also prompts the question- if it's so easy to cut back, why is there so much salt in food in the first place?

The National Salt Reduction Initiative, led by New York City's Michael Bloomberg, has won commitments in salt reduction from a range of companies:

• Au Bon Pain


• Boar's Head Provisions Co.


• FreshDirect


• Goya Foods


• Hain Celestial


• Heinz


• Kraft Foods


• LiDestri Foods, Inc.


• Mars Food US


• McCain Foods


• Red Gold, Inc.


• Starbucks Coffee Company


• Subway®


• Unilever


• White Rose


• Uno Chicago Grill

Though only representing a fraction of the food industry, it's a promising start, includes big names, and represents a mixture of companies already enthusiastic about CSR (Starbucks) and companies that are new to the game (Uno Chicago Grill). It's also great to see companies like Uno, Kraft, Goya, Subway and Heinz participating, whose products strike me as particularly salty- just thinking back to my interactions with them.

The NSRI is very smart, and is akin to Stage 4 CSR- right before these voluntary initiatives turn into regulation, organized at the behest of a powerful city. It's ideal to warn industries about what may be coming if they don't shape up, since it's also ideal to deal with these issues without regulation, as noted earlier. It's also fair for firms to take credit for their voluntary reductions still; it's not the case of Bank of America lying about voluntary mortgage forgiveness that a court settlement actually forced them into. In the future, I hope that government creates more "last chance at CSR" programs to work with industries and see if it takes prior to creating new regulation.

Obviously, the salt industry is not pleased.