Food companies pushing low-salt products see decline in customer satisfaction

Most visible among their food industry peers in claiming "credit" for reducing salt in their product lines, ConAgra Foods and Campbell Soup both have declining customer satisfaction scores from baseline, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index released today. ConAgra, in fact, finished dead last among the 13 named larger companies (and below the "all others" category).

On a 0-100 point scale in the ACSI, food manufacturers averaged 83 points with Campbell Soup lagging in 12th place with 82 and ConAgra dropping 6 points to 78. Leaders were H.J. Heinz with 89 followed, at 87, by Hershey, Quaker (PepsiCo) and Mars.

ACSI produces indexes for 10 economic sectors, 44 industries, and more than 200 companies and federal or local government agencies. Among all industries , manufacturers earned 81.5. Laggards were newspapers, cable/satellite TV companies and airlines (63 and 64). They, together with telephone companies (69), were the only private sector businesses with customer satisfaction as low as the federal government at 69.

ACSI is sponsored by the American Society for Quality, the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and Cloes Fornell International.

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