Food for Thought launches campaign against McDonald's marketing

With a workshop on Nov. 4, Tufts Food for Thought officially kicked off its Retire Ronald campaign to end McDonald's use of mascot Ronald McDonald as a marketing practice that targets children.

Sydney Giacalone, a Food for Thought member who led the initiative on campus, explained that the campaign, which is a part of a project first started by Corporate Accountability International in 2010, is running in conjunction with a week of live action activities in Chicago.

"[Corporate Accountability International's] idea is that [by retiring Ronald], fewer kids will associate McDonald's with [a] fun and social experience," Food for Thought President Ellie Doyle said. "Their hope is that even though McDonald's won't change its food, young kids won't be hooked on it from a young age. A big part of what makes people eat McDonald's, or any other fast food for that matter, is nostalgia."

Giacalone, a sophomore, led the workshop earlier this month with Hanna Saltzman, organizer of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign, to get students involved in the effort.

Food for Thought hosted a call-in on Nov. 13 and 14 in the Mayer Campus Center to put pressure on McDonald’sSenior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Peter Bensen, according to Tufts Sustainability Collective Co-Director Shelby Luce. Luce, a sophomore whose organization serves as  Food for Thought's umbrella organization, said that students made 30-second calls to Bensen, who is in charge of the company's marketing strategy.

"It was really attacking him to show that he does have the power to make this kind of choice," she said. "I think [Corporate] Accountability [International] thought that would really get a message across, if you had a ton of calls in one day and emails and postcards."

Food for Thought members kept the call-in as a surprise when they advertised the gathering, according to Doyle, a sophomore. She said it was necessary to keep the call-in a secret until it actually took place, because it would have more impact as a surprise.

Corporate Accountability International Media Director Jesse Bragg explained that several protests have taken place in Chicago, and many advertisements, letters, emails and calls have been directed at Bensen.

“In Chicago, a group of dozens of moms, young people and community health advocates [rallied] in front of a McDonald's," he said. "There was an ad in a Chicago-area paper focused on the corporation's CFO, Pete Bensen. He is in charge and designed the bottom line of the corporation, and he should be concerned when he sees the corporation continuing to ignore the problem of serious profit loss."

Profit loss is a problem for McDonald's, according to Giacalone, who said profits have suffered in recent months.

"Their profits this quarter went down 30 percent," she said. "This is a loss they have never seen before, and it speaks to how the public climate on what Ronald means has turned so negative."

Bragg also underscored that Corporate Accountability International encourages McDonald's to retire Ronald as a mascot because the marketing campaigns target children.

“I think that when we look at the fast food industry, it’s no secret that the vast majority of the food that it sells to people at every age is very unhealthy," he said. "The reason we look at Ronald McDonald is because he is used to target children. Targeting children is not only bad for kids' health -- it’s bad for business. McDonald’s has reported dismal earnings, and rather then addressing the source of the decline, which is their unhealthy food, it continues to target kids and sell unhealthy food."

Doyle explained that using Ronald to target children causes them to associate McDonald's with positive experiences. Once kids have this association, it can create a lasting and unconscious desire to eat fast food, she said.

Giacalone said that Ronald’s retirement will only happen gradually, and that the goal is not to change the actual quality of McDonald’s food. She compared the effort to retire Ronald to Corporate Accountability International's previous effort to end the use of Joe Camel, the cartoon icon of Camel cigarettes.

“The goal with Retire Ronald is not to try to get McDonald's to change their food, because their brand loyalty rests on their unhealthy food … but once you get rid of that tool used to target kids, sales are so much less," she said. "If you look at child and teen smoking rates in the U.S. after they got rid of [Joe Camel], they are significantly less. It is a way of decreasing the consumption of an unhealthy product without actually changing the company's identity."

On campus, Food for Thought aims to increase action for food sustainability and corporate accountability, according to Giacalone.

“Tufts has a lot of programs and talk about sustainable food and never has really done a lot with it, so Food for Thought is really trying to bring the Tufts campus into a real national campaign that is dealing with the issues that we talk about all the time,” she said.

Bragg and Giacalone said they hoped Tufts’ efforts can be a rallying cry for Boston to get more involved in the Retire Ronald movement.

“This is only going to help echo the call in Boston," Bragg said. "Every voice that gets involved amplifies it and makes it harder and harder for the companies to ignore that this needs to end."