There’s disappointment, and then there’s despair, and a vivid example of the latter came in the unlikely form of an April review on the Annie’s Homegrown website for its boxed Macaroni and Classic Cheddar, which has a new recipe that the package proclaims is “Now Cheesier!”
“I’ve been eating this mac and cheese since I was literally 2 years old,” the one-star review began. “To say I’m devastated over the recipe change is an understatement. It tastes NOTHING like it used to. I’m never buying again unless you change the recipe back.”
General Mills, which purchased Annie’s in 2014, announced the new recipe for some of the brand’s mac-and-cheese products in September, calling it a “delightful upgrade” that has “even more ooey gooey real cheese” in a press release.
But many Annie’s customers disagree, and with the exception of incentivized positive reviews it imported from the Influenster.com website, many recent reviews on its website have been negative.
“‘Now cheesier’ is extremely disappointing :(” stated an April one-star review from a woman who said she’d been eating the product “exclusively for 22 years” but now found the sauce to have “significantly less flavor” and wouldn’t be purchasing it again unless they “bring back the old recipe.”
A recent post on Mouse Print, a consumer advocacy website, compared the old and new ingredient lists for the products and concluded that Annie’s is engaging in “skimpflation,” which refers to the reformulation of products with cheaper ingredients.
The post concluded the new “ingredients don’t exactly shout new and improved.” Even though cheese is high in protein and calcium, it turns out the “Now Cheesier” recipe has 22.3% less of both protein (9 grams, previously 11) and calcium (90 milligrams, previously 110).
That nutritional shift appears to come from a change in the recipe that General Mills did not highlight in its press release: The fourth and fifth ingredients from the old recipe, butter and nonfat milk, have been removed and replaced with cornstarch, a thickener which contains no protein.
Build mac better: Retail Brew asked Renee Leber, the food science and technical services manager at the Institute of Food Technologists, who’s worked on many product recipe developments and reformulations, to examine Annie’s old and new recipes and nutrition panels.
Leber noted that while truth in labeling requires that the new recipe have a statistically significant amount of more cheese, Annie’s has not made claims about either the percentage of increased cheese content or the percentage of cheese, listed as the second ingredient after pasta in both old and new formulations, contained in the overall product.
With the caveat that it’s “almost impossible to guess” a company’s motivation for reformulation without seeing a recipe’s exact proportions, Leber suggested it was likely a cost-cutting strategy.
“Logically speaking, there’s a good chance that if they took the milk and the butter out, replaced it with cornstarch, and then did a smaller percentage increase on the cheese, that they might have gone to a less expensive formulation,” Leber told Retail Brew.
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Sally Lyons Wyatt, global EVP and chief advisor of consumer goods and food service at Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm, said that with the current nutritional obsession with protein, it’s counterintuitive that Annie’s reformulated a product to have nearly a quarter less of it.
“If you give up on the protein, you’re running right into a very heavy headwind, because everybody’s upping the grams of protein, not taking them down,” Lyons Wyatt told Retail Brew.
Fans of Annie’s, which promotes its use of organic ingredients, may be more apt to notice such nutritional nuances.
“The natural food consumer is more in tune than the mass population consumer,” Lyons Wyatt said. “[Natural food] consumers inherently are more health conscious, health aware, health educated, [and] therefore are very much going to be zeroing in on what changes were made.”
Mac to the future: Retail Brew posed several questions in writing to General Mills, among them: why it changed the Annie’s recipe to begin with, why the amount of protein in the product might have decreased if it added extra cheese, why it appeared to have removed milk and butter from the recipe, and whether it was considering returning to the old recipe.
The company addressed none of those questions directly in a written response.
“We’re always looking for ways to ensure our products deliver on the taste and quality our consumers want,” wrote Mollie Wulff, corporate communications manager at General Mills.
Wulff said the brand “spoke to many Annie’s fans during the recipe development process” and that “the new recipe with more cheese has been well received overall. We know any changes to a beloved product can come with mixed feedback, and we welcome consumers to continue to share their thoughts with us.”
There’s no indication that the new recipe is hurting sales for Annie’s mac and cheese products, at least not yet. For the 52 weeks ending April 20, Annie’s revenues were up 2% over the previous year, more than the 1.6% increase for the overall mac and cheese mix category, according to Circana data. Category leader Kraft Heinz saw revenues decrease 4.8% over the same period, while private label mixes (voracious of late across multiple categories) grew 5.3%.
In 2022, Smart Balance quite literally watered down the recipe for its buttery spread, with water, previously second, becoming the first (and most plentiful) ingredient.The new packaging also highlighted that the reformulation contained 39% vegetable oils, down from 64% before.
After an onslaught of negative reviews and other consumer backlash, Conagra, which owns the brand, reverted back to the original recipe.