Reading, writing & junk food advertising

Just as McDonald’s is mending fences with parents by offering healthier meal options and vowing to limit advertising to children, it has found itself in hot water again with anti-junk food activists. Their beef is with a corporate-sponsorship programme by McDonald’s franchises in Florida that awards high-performing students with Happy Meals.

The “report card incentive” programme is outlined on envelopes designed and paid for by local McDonald’s outlets in which every elementary school student’s report card at 37 schools in Seminole County, Florida, is sent home. Students aged between five and 13 earn a free Happy Meal for report cards with all grade As and Bs or an attendance record of two absences or fewer.

Critics such as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) say the envelopes, which bear an image of corporate mascot Ronald McDonald and photographs of Happy Meal items, are blatant advertising to children that puts parents wanting to limit their children’s junk food intake at a disadvantage.

The school district, which has more than 900 corporate partners, says the sponsorships are necessary to help fund academic programmes. And although McDonald’s corporate headquarters says it does not directly sponsor any programmes that reward students with food, it does endorse the Florida programme sponsored by its local franchises.

McDonald’s is certainly not alone in offering academic “food prize” incentives. A plethora of national and local restaurant chains and franchises offer similar programmes, including Pizza Hut, Chili’s, Johnny Carino’s, Golden Corral, and Chuck E Cheese’s.

In addition, companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi sponsor school athletic teams and sports facilities for exclusive rights to advertise and sell their products on campus, while others, such as cereal maker General Mills, offer “educational materials”, including reading and craft projects featuring their products.

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study reports that about 30 million children are exposed to in-school marketing of junk food. The group says about two-thirds of all schools in the US allow advertising by companies that sell “foods of minimal nutritional value”.

The foundation also argues that the schools receive little or no actual income from the partnerships and most schools report that, even without food marketing, few if any programmes or activities would be cut.

Susan Pagan, a Seminole County parent who lodged the initial complaint about the McDonald’s report card envelopes, says the campaign was much more blatant than the Pizza Hut programme it replaced. Pagan, who says she has worked in marketing and advertising for more than two decades, argues there are more “tasteful and professional” ways for corporations to sponsor such programmes.