Food giant General Mills' campaign against hunger

To Mark Addicks, chief marketing officer for General Mills, the goal of his company is simple.

"We nourish lives," Addicks said in an interview about General Mills' anti-hunger efforts.

Outnumber Hunger is a campaign in its third year that allows customers of General Mills to take a code from special boxes of the company's products and enter it online. For each entry, the company donates 55.5 cents to Feeding America to support food banks across the country.

The campaign's partners include Gannett Co. and country western music performers.

Addicks will be part of a presentation this week on cause marketing at the Shopper Marketing Expo in Minneapolis, sponsored by the Path to Purchase Institute.

Addicks, who recently announced that he will retire from the Golden Valley-based food company next year after 26 years, sat down with the Star Tribune to discuss hunger, marketing and changing tastes in the United States.

Q: How serious is the U.S. hunger problem?

Q: How did General Mills get involved with Outnumber Hunger?

A: We wanted to raise awareness about hunger. We wanted to create a national movement in a way that consumers could have an effect down to the local level. Consumers can enter a code from specially marked General Mills packages and that allows them to donate five meals to Feeding America. They can enter a ZIP code to drive their contribution down to their community. It's a successful formula that has enabled consumers to make a difference. This is more than donating food to a food bank. This is a direct consumer program. The first year we linked up with Feeding America and the Big Machine Label Group — a country label. Big Machine, like us, has a sincere interest in hunger in the United States. We knew that would capture people's attention, especially country western fans. Then Gannett came in and pushed the story out with their newspapers, TV stations and digital capabilities. We had a concert in April in Las Vegas timed with the American Country Music Awards. Thousands of people saw that and Gannett put it on their TV stations. That gave us a national TV footprint.

Q: How much has been raised for Outnumber Hunger?

A: When we are done with the campaign this year we will have donated $1.2 million for 10 million meals. Over the last three years, we've helped secure more than 35 million meals for Feeding America.

Q: How do you engage consumers in this project?

Q: What is next?

A: We're already working on Year 4 and expanding the program into new areas. We've teamed up with Free the Children to bring We Scare Hunger, a Canadian program, to Seattle and Minneapolis last year. It engages young adults. We'll do We Scare Hunger around Halloween again this year to urge junior high and high school kids to trick-or-treat for dry goods instead of candy to donate to local food banks. We want to take it national this year. We hope to collect 200,000 pounds of food. We'll put digital and radio behind it. Then we'll do something next spring to fill food banks as we head into summer.

Q: What changes have you seen in food marketing during your 26 years at General Mills?

A: Probably the biggest change has been in the digital arena and the ability to go one-on-one with consumers. We talk a lot here about what is a brand's purpose and our goal is to show consumers the role brands can play in their lives. We have a Kix box that can be cut up into toys or scanned with a phone to get other kinds of content. Consumers can connect with the BettyCrocker.com app and get a great meal idea. Food is changing with millennials, too. Millennials love making food, the fuss of food. They really care about how their food is made, where it comes from and what the food makers care about and value. It's so dynamic. There are so many creative outlets. We're a major food content player. We get to see what people are buying and what people are searching for by geography. We can see markets that we didn't know were there. But marketing doesn't equal advertising. You have to be creative. It's still a right-side-of-the-brain thing.

Q: How have consumer tastes changed?