‘Appetite suppressant’ lollipops and ‘detox’ teas have been promoted by the company’s hand-selected celebrities and Instagram models

“Got Cravings?” asked the billboard from its perch above a Times Square pizzeria. “Girl, Tell Them To #SUCKIT”.

The image was arresting: a pretty young woman sucking an “appetite suppressant” lollipop splashed across a canvas of millennial pink. Flat Tummy Co, an online retailer that had previously existed almost exclusively within the digital confines of Instagram, arrived in New York City like Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita updated into a 21st-century boss babe.

Sophie Vershbow (@svershbow) Hey Twitter,



Let’s use our power for good by guilting @FlatTummyCo into taking down their Times Square billboard advertising appetite suppressants.



Love,

A former-anorexic teenage girl pic.twitter.com/Tiyj1fwrpD

The product for sale – 35 calories worth of flavored cane sugar laced with an extract of saffron that supposedly curbs hunger – sparked immediate backlash for a company that had built its brand selling so-called “detox” teas. Good Place actor Jameela Jamil called out Kim Kardashian West for promoting the lollipops to her 116 million Instagram followers (“You terrible and toxic influence on young girls,” Jamil tweeted), and more than 100,000 people signed an online petition calling for the billboard’s removal.

Flat Tummy Co’s response has been to keep calm and ’gram on. The company is the ultimate Instagram brand success story: a perfect example of how unregulated social media marketing practices can repackage questionable science in the feelgood trappings of a wellness brand and spin women’s insecurities into cash. And Instagram, which claims to want to be “one of the most kind and safe” places on the internet, has neither the power nor the will to police it.

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Indeed, Instagram is such a crucial factor in Flat Tummy Co’s value that when the company was sold for $10m in 2015, its “significant social media presence” was highlighted in a press release ahead of actual assets or sales figures. Armies of “influencers” – including Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie and Kris Jenner – promote its products to their followers. Most of the influencers are strictly Instagram-famous: semi-professional models with tens of thousands of female followers who almost always fail to disclose that their endorsements are bought and paid for.

“It’s not a positive message for women, is it? It’s pretty bad,” said one former Flat Tummy Co employee, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, about the company’s move into selling appetite suppressants. “The ex-employees are all quite close … Everyone’s just kind of, ‘Ugh, we were a part of that.’”

The former employee argued that the outrage toward the Kardashians was misdirected: “Why is no one calling out the company? This isn’t about them. It’s the company that’s the problem.”

‘We thought we’d struck gold’

Flat Tummy Tea debuted on Instagram on 14 June 2013. It took time for the company to develop its current Instaesthetic: the tea was originally sold in transparent plastic bags that showed off the product’s earthiness; the label was a purplish blue; the font had yet to lose its serifs.

But the beginnings of a brand identity were apparent from the outset: aspirational images of beautiful women with tiny stomachs and big butts, before and after shots of customers’ bloated and deflated bellies, and a studied mix of pseudo-feminist millennial boss bitch attitude: mason jar smoothies, jokes about alcohol, girl power slogans, an assortment of healthy-ish dishes, junk food and pink workout gear, and the odd inspirational quote from Nelson Mandela.

Laramie Taylor, a professor of communication at UC Davis who researches media and idealized bodies, described the body image the brand promotes – “a very flat and toned stomach but the bust and posterior of someone whose body mass index is considerably higher” – as absurdly unrealistic.

“It comes down to this idea of setting expectations for women that are frequently contradictory and impossible to satisfy,” Taylor said.

The company was a humble affair at first, according to an interview founders Bec and Tim Polmear gave to a Tasmanian business publication in 2017 (they declined to speak to the Guardian). The tea was reportedly formulated to treat Bec Polmear’s “digestion and bloating”, and they manufactured it in their home garage in Australia with ingredients purchased from a local herbalist.

The company’s first coup was a social media post by a popular nutrition blogger from New Zealand. “We had 17 orders in an hour and thought we’d struck gold,” Ted Polmear explained.

From there, the company started paying Instagram influencers and built an algorithm that could predict a model’s sales potential, Polmear said. By November 2015, the brand had racked up 500,000 Instagram followers and was sold to Canada’s Synergy CHC Corp for $10m in cash and stock.

‘You’re not worth that much money’

In interviews with the Guardian, two former Flat Tummy Co employees described the process by which the company flooded Instagram with thousands of paid-for posts.

Each week, they were tasked with identifying and contacting between 150 and 200 new influencers, with the goal of getting 50 to 60 of them on board for a series of four promotional posts each. The ideal model was a woman with at least 100,000 followers.

“They had a rating system, depending on how ‘on brand’ you were,” explained one of the former employees. “You don’t want someone who already has a six pack. You want a mum who is on her fit journey trying to lose weight after having kids.”

African American and Latina models were prized because their posts “converted” well into sales, while models were downgraded if they were too “slutty” on the assumption that their followers would be mostly male.

‘No one is going to listen to a skinny white girl say that she bought this tea and it’s great,’ said a former employee of Flat Tummy Co.

“If someone is a little bit bigger, they get a higher rating than if someone’s skinny,” one former employee said. “No one is going to a listen to a skinny white girl say that she bought this tea and it’s great.”

Added the other former employee: “If they were sexier, showed a lot of skin, or showed too much boobs, it was like, ‘Don’t pay them, try to get free posts.’”

Valentina Barron, a spokeswoman for Flat Tummy Co, told the Guardian by email: “The ambassadors we collaborate with are a mix of all different types of women, because that’s what our customers are. Women can experience bloating, digestive issues or anything else in between no matter what their size.”

The former employees said they were pressured to keep the cost of influencer posts down. While the Kardashians reportedly earn six-figure fees for their Instagram ads, the influencers that the former employees worked with were “lucky to get $25 to $50”, one of the former employees said. “You basically had to cut them down and say, ‘You’re not worth that much money.’”

🍭 A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on May 15, 2018 at 4:00pm PDT

Once an influencer agreed to the deal, the staffers would direct how their photos should look and write copy for the captions: “We never expected them to actually use the tea. It just had to look like it.”

Barron disputed that point: “We specifically request and most certainly expect, that all of our ambassadors try and love our products. That’s why they’re our ambassadors!”

Both employees said they were disappointed with the company’s current direction.

“They always used to preach this whole, ‘We’re not a weight loss company. We just want to be healthy,’” one said. “Which has obviously changed with these lollipops.”

‘Snake oil, plain and simple’

Flat Tummy Co nevertheless still claims that it cares about “health” above all.

“Our brand is all about helping women look and feel like the best versions of themselves and our mission statement is to empower women to lead a healthier lifestyle,” Barron said.

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But medical and nutritional experts harshly criticized the company’s products and claims.

“Dietary supplements sold for detox or weight loss are snake oil, plain and simple,” said Dr S Bryn Austin, a Harvard Medical School professor who specializes in eating disorder risks. “The liver and kidneys already do the the so-called detox and adding junk products into the diet only makes their job harder. And weight loss claims for these products are either outright sham or a result of adulteration of the products with potentially dangerous stimulants, laxatives or diuretics.”

Dr Rachel Scherr, a researcher at UC Davis’s department of nutrition, reviewed the ingredients included in Flat Tummy Co’s products at the Guardian’s request, and raised numerous concerns. All the products rely on ingredients that are classified as nutritional supplements, rather than drugs, which means that they are untested and unregulated.

Flat Tummy Co’s tea contains senna, a laxative, which Scherr said could help with bloating but could also lead to dependence on laxatives. The company’s meal replacement shakes include “patented and clinically studied Super Citrimax” – an extract of garcinia cambogia, which has been hawked as a miracle weight loss drug by the likes of Dr Oz but which Scherr noted has been “conclusively determined” to have no link to weight loss or fat loss.

As for the lollipops, they include Satiereal, which Flat Tummy calls a “clinically proven safe active ingredient”. Scherr pointed out that the study touted by Satiereal’s French manufacturer is from 2010, while a study published in 2018 found “no effects” on weight loss.

Scherr also criticized the “tips” for your “health kick” published on the company’s website, which include “Cut back on veggies.”

“Does this company really recommend eating fewer vegetables?” Scherr asked. “That is not good advice!”

On Instagram, Flat Tummy Co advises to cut back on vegetables.

Barron defended Flat Tummy Co in her statement, writing: “We never have, and never will – promote unhealthy eating behaviours or anything of that nature. Every product we’ve created for this brand, and everything we do with this brand, is all about motivating women to make positive, healthy changes in their lives, and our products are designed to give them the boost in the right direction that they might be missing.”

To Claire Mysko, the chief executive officer of the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), this is nothing but a rhetorical ploy.

“There is a shift away from language that explicitly talks about weight loss and a shift toward wellness and lifestyle changes,” she said. “It’s the same old products marketed in new language.”

‘The most kind and safe platform’

Both Mysko and Taylor, the UC Davis professor, expressed special concern over the marketing of the products on social media, especially since influencer posts are rarely labeled as advertisements, despite Instagram’s creation of a “paid partnership” label.

“We’re comparing our real self to someone else’s made-up, photoshopped, carefully composed, idealized self,” Taylor said. “And ultimately that is exactly what the people who want to sell us these products need. They need us to feel bad about ourselves so we buy their product.”

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Instagram is fully aware of the dangers of spreading unrealistic body expectations. The company has banned various “thinspiration” and pro-eating disorder hashtags, and worked with NEDA on initiatives like an eating disorder help page and eating disorder recovery hashtag.

“Every day people come to Instagram to build communities of support, particularly around body image,” spokeswoman Stephanie Noon said in a statement. “We are committed to making Instagram one of the most kind and safe platforms, and we will continue to shed light on the people redefining body image and encouraging body positivity in our community.”

Indeed, Instagram has a number of policies designed to combat advertiser efforts to “generate negative self-perception” in order to sell health, fitness or weight loss products. Ads for such products are prohibited from targeting minors and from using “before and after” images or images that feature on “zoomed body parts”.

And yet Flat Tummy Co is almost entirely immune to Instagram’s strictures because those policies only apply when an advertiser pays Instagram to promote their posts, not when the advertiser pays an influencer. So Flat Tummy Co can run as many “before and after” shots of zoomed in bellies as it wants – and it runs a lot of them – as long as it doesn’t pay Instagram to boost the posts’ audience. And if Flat Tummy Co wants to target teenage girls, it need only find an influencer with a young fanbase.

Asked about this giant loophole, Noon responded, “We are looking at this area closely and trying to understand areas for improvement, so we can help our community navigate this type of content.”

In the meantime, the combination of Instagram and Flat Tummy Co remains an astonishingly unhealthy brew.

“Personally I will never buy something that has been recommended to me on Instagram,” said one of the former Flat Tummy Co employees. “I just know that there’s someone pulling the strings.”