Fast food branding really does make food more appetising to children. A study has revealed that pre-school kids prefer foods wrapped in McDonalds packaging over the same snacks wrapped in unmarked packaging.

The finding gives all the more reason to limit the marketing of fast foods to youngsters, say the researchers who conducted the study. But they also add that it suggests that powerful branding could help sell more nutritious healthy foods to a generation of increasingly overweight kids.

Dina Borzekowski at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and her colleagues asked 63 preschoolers, aged three to five, to sample two meals, each consisting of a chicken nugget, a quarter of a hamburger, french fries, two baby carrots and a small cup of milk.

Although both meals came from a local McDonalds, only one of them appeared in its original packaging. Researchers presented items from the other meal in plain wrappers, which lacked the company’s distinctive logo.


In most cases children said they tasted a difference between the two meals, and they overwhelmingly preferred the McDonalds-branded foods.

Commercial influence

For example, 76 per cent favoured the fries presented in the branded packaging, compared with 13 per cent who liked the unbranded fries better. And while 60 per cent of the children preferred the McDonalds-branded chicken nuggets, only 10 per cent favoured the nuggets presented in plain wrapping.

“It’s no surprise that branding works,” says Borzekowski. “What’s interesting about these results is to see how strongly it affects the three- to five-year-olds.”

The study also found that children in homes with more televisions were more likely to show a preference for the branded meal, suggesting that fast-food commercials exert a strong influence.

“It just shows how difficult it is for parents to fight the battle alone,” says Kathryn Montgomery, an expert on children and media at American University in Washington DC.

Experts have estimated that the food and beverage industries spend more than $10 billion each year to market products to US children. “They could just as easily use marketing to support parents in their efforts to feed kids a healthy diet,” says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest based in Washington DC.

Healthy alternative

Borzekowski points out that the children in the study were twice as likely to prefer the McDonalds-branded carrots as the plain-packaged ones. This suggests that marketing savvy could perhaps convince youngsters to make healthful choices. Some companies have already begun experimenting with this tactic by using Mickey Mouse cartoons to sell sliced fruit and placing Curious George stickers on bananas.

Last month McDonalds announced it would shift its advertising targeted to children under the age of 13 to focus on the 375-calorie Happy Meal, which it says meets current dietary standards outlined by the government.

Nutritionists hope that curbing fast-food television ads will help reverse the obesity epidemic among youngsters. But new forms of cellphone and internet marketing mean that adolescents are increasingly exposed to junk-food ads. “My guess is that the effects [of ads] might even increase with time,” says Thomas Robinson at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in California, who co-authored the new study with Borzekowski.

Journal reference: Archives of Pediatrics (vol 161, p792-797)