Low-Carb Craze Takes a Bite Out of Food Fund-Raising Sales

Girl Scout Troop 2077 in New Rochelle, N.Y., didn’t sell enough cookies this year to pay for its annual

overnight outing. The reason, says the troop’s leader, Judy Lederman: Too many potential customers are trying to lose weight by shunning carbohydrates.

“Low-carb diets are killing us,” says Ms. Lederman. “We can’t sell enough cookies if everyone is cutting carbs.”

The low-carbohydrate craze may have taken a bigger bite out of Troop 2077’s fund-raising sales than those of many other nonprofit groups, but the New Rochelle scouts aren’t the only ones to be hit by America’s newest dieting obsession.

Diets such as Atkins, South Beach, and the Zone, which eschew starchy, sugary foods, are changing the way people eat, and transforming the entire food and restaurant industry. Restaurant menu items and grocery-store products that promote their low number of carbohydrates are cropping up everywhere, and food manufacturers are scrambling to come up with new recipes and new packaging to appeal to the tens of millions of consumers who are watching their carbohydrate intake.

Charities that run food sales to earn money and the businesses that supply them are also trying to keep up with the carbohydrate-counting public. And the stakes are enormous.

Nonprofit groups, including many school-related groups, such as parent-teacher organizations, net about $2-billion a year selling food items as well as magazines and gifts, says Vickie Mabry, associate director of the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors & Suppliers. According to a survey her group conducted a couple of years ago, the most popular products for fund-raising sales are candies and other confections — food typically quite high in sugar, a no-no for low-carbohydrate dieters.

She says the industry is buzzing about the potential impact of the low-carbohydrate craze on fund-raising sales. Some distributors and charities are mulling new products to offer, while others are trying new ways to market traditional favorites.

Keeping Up With Trends

Despite the clamor, some fund-raising experts say that low-carbohydrate mania may never hit fund-raising sales as hard as it has been hitting regular consumer sales. People are typically less choosy about products they buy as part of a fund-raising sale, the experts say, since the buyers’ primary reason for purchasing the item often is to support the charity.

Still, nonprofit groups that depend on food sales for revenue are paying close attention to the growing popularity of the carb-counting diets.

“Companies are exploring low-carb, low-fat, low-anything products because that’s what it takes to make sure they stay on the edge,” Ms. Mabry says.

Says Brother Rick Curry, founder of the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, in New York: “If you are supporting a not-for-profit through sales, you’d better keep up with the trends and business opportunities.”

Brother Curry’s group runs a bakery in Maine that earns about $100,000 each year by selling breads and dog biscuits online. The bakery expects to add a low-carbohydrate bread to its product line later this year.

Businesses that distribute food to charities for resale are adding to their menus, too.

Profit Quests, in Monroe, La., in January started offering meat snacks, which are low in sugar and high in protein.

“Low-carb dieters are flooding the market these days,” the company’s Web site says. “Why not be a part of this phenomenon by selling low-sugar and low-carb fund-raising products.” Company officials say they introduced meat snacks in response to requests for low-carbohyrate foods, but they say it is too early to tell whether charities will snatch them up.

Creative Marketing

Other companies were already well-situated to cash in on low-carbohydrate mania. Annick’s Old World Coffee and Tea, an Albertville, Minn., business that sells its specialty coffees to nonprofit groups for fund-raising events, recently redesigned some of its online marketing materials.

“Did you know most of our coffee has zero carbs!” Annick’s Web site gushes.

Some charities that still sell treats that pack in the carbohydrates are also being more creative with their marketing.

Girl Scouts of the USA came out with a low-fat cookie, the Lemon Cooler, last year, but so far has no plans to introduce a low-carbohydrate cookie. Without a low-carb product to tout, some local scout groups are tweaking their sales pitches.

San Francisco’s scouting organization, which oversees 30,000 girls, plugged its “Gift of Caring” program, which allows people to buy boxes that are delivered directly to local food banks.

“We didn’t know what was going to [happen] with the carb craze,” says Nikki Van Ausdall, a vice president at the Girl Scouts of San Francisco Bay Area. “We thought we’d better make plans to address concerns people might have about buying cookies.”

Girls in the council’s region sold about two million boxes during this year’s cookie sale, roughly the same number as last year. But more than 6,000 of the boxes were bought as donations through the gift program, a 26-percent increase over 2003.

Courtney Q. Shore, a senior vice president at Girl Scouts of the USA, says that the organization does not collect national data on cookie sales. However, she says it appears that this year’s sales — typically held in January and February — were consistent overall with last year’s.

Most buyers, she says, want to support the scouts and are loyal to the Girl Scout brand of cookies, which the organization has been selling for more than 90 years. She says that many people, too, consider the cookies their once-a-year indulgence.

“It’s low-fat one year, low-carb the next year, low-calories the next,” Ms. Shore says. “Whatever it is, in the end, Americans want their Thin Mints.”