One surefire way fast food brands can get customers in the door is by marketing flashy toys. While these limited-edition action figures and pocket games are fun, have you noticed that they haven’t been promoted as much recently? You’re not wrong — fast food chain restaurants have stopped pushing toys so heavily in their marketing.
The main factor was that children were requesting stops at fast food establishments too frequently. Over time, this promoted an unhealthy lifestyle. Along with all of those unhealthy and bad ingredients in fast food, the association of fast food restaurants with toys created harmful habits in youth, so regulations began to spring up. Some brands, like McDonald’s and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, formed a self-regulatory program called the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative in 2006. This organization seeks to encourage advertising for healthier lifestyle choices and create more guidelines for marketing aimed at children. Since this association started, according to Healthy Food America, studies have shown children have viewed less junk food marketing.
Many other attempts were made to widen these restrictions. Congress attempted to pass legislation to create voluntary requirements for the food industry to limit harmful advertising to children. One requirement was for meals sold with toys to meet a minimum set of nutritional standards. These requirements never came to fruition in the U.S. due to industry lobbying. Still, other countries such as Chile and Taiwan banned the food industry from using toys to market fast food. These restrictions proved to limit children’s exposure to fast food.
Unhealthy eating wasn’t the only issue with kids meal toys
Not only is creating toys to market fast food to kids harmful — it’s also wasteful. Kids simply don’t stay entertained by cheap plastic toys for long. McDonald’s released a statement in which the fast food giant pledged to reduce the amount of plastic in its Happy Meal toys by 2025, but that’s not the only issue. Some people scramble to buy meals with toys simply to get collectible items. KFC got some flack for this in China after releasing six different figurines and giving them out with meals in a blind box. One customer bought 106 meals to try to collect them all. That’s a lot of food going to waste.
Some countries may have restrictions on using toys to sell meals, but in the age of the internet, it’s not enough. Why spend money producing physical items when you can churn out internet ads instead? Most fast food restaurants have long phased out using toys to advertise kids’ meals, relying on TV or social media ads instead to appeal to that demographic. As children increasingly use phones that rely on algorithms to decide which content will show up, unregulated marketing is becoming more of an issue. Luckily, laws have been proposed and passed to limit children’s exposure to these online ads too.
While it’s great for kids to get new toys, let the Happy Meal action figure be a nice surprise instead of a desperate need. And if you or your child don’t need the toy, telling a fast food worker to leave it out is good for the planet in the long run. Maybe the day will come when fast food restaurant chains don’t include toys in the meals at all, which will be a boon to the sanity of parents everywhere.
