Overcoming resistance to new food products.

Selling new food products is seldom easy. Of those conceived by the food industry in any year the proportion which are finally found acceptable by the public in terms of the only true criteria of success, namely continuous purchase, is relatively small. But when we turn to products conceived and marketed under the auspices of the international agencies and of the philanthropic bodies of the world the success rate falls to virtually zero. It is not my intcntion to examine in any detail the reason for the high failure rate amongst commercially conceived products, although in practice some of the points I will make in relation to social and psychological aspects of change, have their relevance in this field. My main concern is to try and indicate why nutritionally dcsirable foods created for the developing countries and sponsored by these wellintentioned organizations have a failure rate a good deal worse than the commercial world. If it were only possible to achieve the modicum of success normally obtained in commercial operations, it could at least be argued that we were making some satisfactory attempts to solve the world food problem.