Article: Weight Watchers hopes to stay course after being unloaded by H.J. Heinz

NEW YORK -- Weight Watchers spent the past two years simplifying its diet program, beefing up its advertising and paring down its product line.

Those moves, coupled with the rising safety concerns about certain prescription diet pills, generated a surge of new customers at Weight Watchers meetings in 1998 after years of declining enrollments.

But now that H.J. Heinz has put the world's best-known weight- loss program up for sale, analysts doubt another diet marketer will want it, and question why any other player would want to enter the $30 billion topsy turvy diet industry. "It will be a tough sell for Heinz," said David Allen, a diet industry analyst with Granite Financial Group in San ...

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