More Bad News for Smart Choices, Coke and Industry-Led Nutrition Programs

(MoneyWatch)  Food companies aren't faring so well when it comes to positive publicity for their nutrition efforts.

A group of doctors just tore up their American Academy of Family Physicians membership cards in protest of the organization's nutrition-promoting partnership with the Coca-Cola Company. San Francisco attorneys just sent Kellogg a warning over its large front-of-package claims that cereals like Cocoa Krispies "support your child's immunity." And the Smart Choices program is pretty much dead.

The Smart Choices program was a collaboration between food companies and nutritionists to put a green check mark on the front of packages for foods meeting certain nutrition criteria. The idea was to make it easy for consumers to recognize "Smart Choices," but the sugary foods selected earned the program ridicule and government warnings, to the point where the program put itself on hold.

Unilever, General Mills and Kellogg all said they would immediately start phasing out the Smart Choice logo, and now Kraft Foods, too, is officially turning its back on the program. Quotes from a spokeswoman earlier this week suggested Kraft would continue using the labeling system, but yesterday, the spokeswoman clarified that while Kraft would not do anything about Smart Choice products already on shelves, it would indeed stop using Smart Choice labels.

It can't have helped that Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who had, independently of the Food and Drug Administration, initiated his own investigation into Smart Choices, also wrote to each of the involved companies urging them to stop using the labels.

Officially, Smart Choices is merely on hold until the FDA comes out with its labeling guidelines, but my guess is it will never come back -- certainly not in its current form.