View: Can milk, food, drinks drop their healthy halo 'N' just be fun and be loved?
Bournvita lost its crown in the malted drink category. GoI told ecommerce sites and other portals that Mondelez India-owned Bournvita and a few other brands should not be called 'health drinks' because the category isn't defined in the country's food laws. The trigger for this announcement was an influencer's post about the malted drink's sugar content last year. After the backlash, Bournvita, which is marketed as a health supplement for children, was forced to reduce sugar content by nearly 15%.
Children find milk tasteless. So, decades ago, a new category of milk additives was born. In the 1970s, they were called milk food drinks (MFDs). MFDs were of two types: milk substitutes, which could be had by adding hot water (Horlicks being the biggest), and chocolate-flavoured milk additives, or chocolate MFDs, such as Ovaltine, which was popular in the 1960s. Then came Bournvita, Maltova, Nutramul, and Milo.
In the mid-1990s, National Dairy Development Board unleashed the 'Doodh Doodh' campaign to give milk more oomph and vigour. While the ad and jingle added fun to milk, kids still wanted it to get more exciting. And the sale of chocolate MFDs continued to boom.
The cookie brand, Oreo, was marketed in the US, as an aid for getting kids to drink milk. The famous ad showed a mom teaching her child to eat an Oreo cookie: Open the cookie. Lick the cream. Dip the cookie in milk and eat it. What is left unsaid is that then you drink the milk. This 'ritualisation,' or making drinking milk a fun activity, became a part of
