By Michael Moss
New York Times Feb
20,2013
On the evening of April
8, 1999 , a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis America
James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted
the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he
and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America
A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food
science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was
instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable
popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by
pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of
hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting,
he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were
painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the
industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the
hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was
time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their
companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed
the greatest health concerns.
The discussion took place in Pillsbury’s auditorium. The
first speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd. “I very much
appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the
growing challenge it presents for us all,” Mudd began. “Let me say right at the
start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers — for what the
public health community must do to bring this problem under control or for what
the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has
happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who’ve looked hard at this
issue, whether they’re public health professionals or staff specialists in your
own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn’t do is nothing.”
As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in
all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More
than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly
one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as
obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the
number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only
1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers
were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the
American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry
had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”
Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the
last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products:
cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of psychology
and public health, Kelly Brownell, who was an especially vocal proponent of the
view that the processed-food industry should be seen as a public health menace:
“As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to
children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing.
And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor
diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”
“If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a
slippery slope out there,” Mudd said, “I imagine they are beginning to
experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now.”
Mudd then presented the plan he and others had devised to
address the obesity problem. Merely getting the executives to acknowledge some
culpability was an important first step, he knew, so his plan would start off
with a small but crucial move: the industry should use the expertise of
scientists — its own and others — to gain a deeper understanding of what was
driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the effort could unfold
on several fronts. To be sure, there would be no getting around the role that
packaged foods and drinks play in overconsumption. They would have to pull back
on their use of salt, sugar and fat, perhaps by imposing industrywide limits.
But it wasn’t just a matter of these three ingredients; the schemes they used
to advertise and market their products were critical, too. Mudd proposed
creating a “code to guide the nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially
to children.”
“We are saying that the industry should make a sincere
effort to be part of the solution,” Mudd concluded. “And that by doing so, we
can help to defuse the criticism that’s building against us.”
What happened next was not written down. But according to
three participants, when Mudd stopped talking, the one C.E.O. whose recent
exploits in the grocery store had awed the rest of the industry stood up to
speak. His name was Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person — as head of
General Mills — who had the most to lose when it came to dealing with obesity.
Under his leadership, General Mills had overtaken not just the cereal aisle but
other sections of the grocery store. The company’s Yoplait brand had
transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable dessert.
It now had twice as much sugar per serving as General Mills’ marshmallow cereal
Lucky Charms. And yet, because of yogurt’s well-tended image as a wholesome
snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million.
Emboldened by the success, the company’s development wing pushed even harder,
inventing a Yoplait variation that came in a squeezable tube — perfect for
kids. They called it Go-Gurt and rolled it out nationally in the weeks before
the C.E.O. meeting. (By year’s end, it would hit $100 million in sales.)
According to the sources I spoke with, Sanger began by
reminding the group that consumers were “fickle.” (Sanger declined to be
interviewed.) Sometimes they worried about sugar, other times fat. General
Mills, he said, acted responsibly to both the public and shareholders by
offering products to satisfy dieters and other concerned shoppers, from low
sugar to added whole grains. But most often, he said, people bought what they
liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” he
reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical consumer. “Talk to me about
taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff
that doesn’t taste good.”
To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the
sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General Mills
would not pull back. He would push his people onward, and he urged his peers to
do the same. Sanger’s response effectively ended the meeting.
“What can I say?” James Behnke told me years later. “It
didn’t work. These guys weren’t as receptive as we thought they would be.”
Behnke chose his words deliberately. He wanted to be fair. “Sanger was trying
to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around with the company jewels here and
change the formulations because a bunch of guys in white coats are worried
about obesity.’ ”
The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider
admissions of guilt. But I was also struck by how prescient the organizers of
the sit-down had been. Today, one in three adults is considered clinically
obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by
type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people
having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the
rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight
million Americans.
The public and the food companies have known for decades now
— or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are
not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes
and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not
just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a
give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers.
What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort
— taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get
people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more
than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from
scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while
others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of
secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What
follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work
then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to
people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of
these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.
John Lennon couldn’t find it in England New York Cher
all stipulated in their contract riders that it be put in their dressing rooms
when they toured. Hillary Clinton asked for it when she traveled as first lady,
and ever after her hotel suites were dutifully stocked.
What they all wanted was Dr Pepper, which until 2001
occupied a comfortable third-place spot in the soda aisle behind Coca-Cola and
Pepsi. But then a flood of spinoffs from the two soda giants showed up on the
shelves — lemons and limes, vanillas and coffees, raspberries and oranges,
whites and blues and clears — what in food-industry lingo are known as “line
extensions,” and Dr Pepper started to lose its market share.
Responding to this pressure, Cadbury Schweppes created its
first spinoff, other than a diet version, in the soda’s 115-year history, a
bright red soda with a very un-Dr Pepper name: Red Fusion. “If we are to
re-establish Dr Pepper back to its historic growth rates, we have to add more
excitement,” the company’s president, Jack Kilduff, said. One particularly
promising market, Kilduff pointed out, was the “rapidly growing Hispanic and
African-American communities.”
But consumers hated Red Fusion. “Dr Pepper is my all-time
favorite drink, so I was curious about the Red Fusion,” a California
Stung by the rejection, Cadbury Schweppes in 2004 turned to
a food-industry legend named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz, who studied
mathematics and holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Harvard, runs a
consulting firm in White Plains
In the process of product optimization, food engineers alter
a litany of variables with the sole intent of finding the most perfect version
(or versions) of a product. Ordinary consumers are paid to spend hours sitting
in rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product
is in question. Their opinions are dumped into a computer, and the data are
sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which
determines what features will be most attractive to consumers. Moskowitz likes
to imagine that his computer is divided into silos, in which each of the
attributes is stacked. But it’s not simply a matter of comparing Color 23 with
Color 24. In the most complicated projects, Color 23 must be combined with
Syrup 11 and Packaging 6, and on and on, in seemingly infinite combinations.
Even for jobs in which the only concern is taste and the variables are limited
to the ingredients, endless charts and graphs will come spewing out of
Moskowitz’s computer. “The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the
sensory perceptions these ingredients create,” he told me, “so I can just dial
a new product. This is the engineering approach.”
Moskowitz’s work on Prego spaghetti sauce was memorialized
in a 2004 presentation by the author Malcolm Gladwell at the TED conference in Monterey ,
Calif.
Well, yes and no. One thing Gladwell didn’t mention is that
the food industry already knew some things about making people happy — and it
started with sugar. Many of the Prego sauces — whether cheesy, chunky or light
— have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar.
A mere half-cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has the equivalent of more
than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies. It also delivers
one-third of the sodium recommended for a majority of American adults for an entire
day. In making these sauces, Campbell
I first met Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010
at the Harvard Club in Midtown Manhattan. As we talked, he made clear that
while he has worked on numerous projects aimed at creating more healthful foods
and insists the industry could be doing far more to curb obesity, he had no
qualms about his own pioneering work on discovering what industry insiders now
regularly refer to as “the bliss point” or any of the other systems that helped
food companies create the greatest amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for
me,” he said. “I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and
didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead
of my time.”
Moskowitz’s path to mastering the bliss point began in
earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, 16 miles from
Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its
research labs. The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to
food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations when they are in the field. They
know that over time, soldiers would gradually find their meals-ready-to-eat so
boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories
they needed. But what was causing this M.R.E.-fatigue was a mystery. “So I
started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that,
trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” Moskowitz said.
The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey
tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other
hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they
could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”
This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.”
In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the
brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific
satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The
biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex
formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a
distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.
Thirty-two years after he began experimenting with the bliss
point, Moskowitz got the call from Cadbury Schweppes asking him to create a
good line extension for Dr Pepper. I spent an afternoon in his White
Plains
Finding the bliss point required the preparation of 61
subtly distinct formulas — 31 for the regular version and 30 for diet. The
formulas were then subjected to 3,904 tastings organized in Los
Angeles Dallas Chicago Philadelphia
Moskowitz’s data — compiled in a 135-page report for the
soda maker — is tremendously fine-grained, showing how different people and
groups of people feel about a strong vanilla taste versus weak, various aspects
of aroma and the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.”
This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically
by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.
These are terms more familiar to sommeliers, but the mouth feel of soda and
many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the
bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.
In addition to taste, the consumers were also tested on
their response to color, which proved to be highly sensitive. “When we
increased the level of the Dr Pepper flavoring, it gets darker and liking goes
off,” Reisner said. These preferences can also be cross-referenced by age, sex
and race.
On Page 83 of the report, a thin blue line represents the
amount of Dr Pepper flavoring needed to generate maximum appeal. The line is
shaped like an upside-down U, just like the bliss-point curve that Moskowitz
studied 30 years earlier in his Army lab. And at the top of the arc, there is
not a single sweet spot but instead a sweet range, within which “bliss” was
achievable. This meant that Cadbury could edge back on its key ingredient, the
sugary Dr Pepper syrup, without falling out of the range and losing the bliss.
Instead of using 2 milliliters of the flavoring, for instance, they could use
1.69 milliliters and achieve the same effect. The potential savings is merely a
few percentage points, and it won’t mean much to individual consumers who are
counting calories or grams of sugar. But for Dr Pepper, it adds up to colossal
savings. “That looks like nothing,” Reisner said. “But it’s a lot of money. A
lot of money. Millions.”
The soda that emerged from all of Moskowitz’s variations
became known as Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper, and it proved successful beyond
anything Cadbury imagined. In 2008, Cadbury split off its soft-drinks business,
which included Snapple and 7-Up. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group has since been
valued in excess of $11 billion.
II. ‘Lunchtime Is All Yours’
Sometimes innovations within the food industry happen in the
lab, with scientists dialing in specific ingredients to achieve the greatest
allure. And sometimes, as in the case of Oscar Mayer’s bologna crisis, the
innovation involves putting old products in new packages.
The 1980s were tough times for Oscar Mayer. Red-meat
consumption fell more than 10 percent as fat became synonymous with cholesterol,
clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. Anxiety set in at the company’s
headquarters in Madison , Wis.
Bob Drane was the company’s vice president for new business
strategy and development when Oscar Mayer tapped him to try to find some way to
reposition bologna and other troubled meats that were declining in popularity
and sales. I met Drane at his home in Madison
Drane’s first move was to try to zero in not on what
Americans felt about processed meat but on what Americans felt about lunch. He
organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying
bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for
them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but
they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that
nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out
the door. He summed up their remarks for me like this: “It’s awful. I am
scrambling around. My kids are asking me for stuff. I’m trying to get myself
ready to go to the office. I go to pack these lunches, and I don’t know what
I’ve got.” What the moms revealed to him, Drane said, was “a gold mine of
disappointments and problems.”
He assembled a team of about 15 people with varied skills,
from design to food science to advertising, to create something completely new
— a convenient prepackaged lunch that would have as its main building block the
company’s sliced bologna and ham. They wanted to add bread, naturally, because
who ate bologna without it? But this presented a problem: There was no way
bread could stay fresh for the two months their product needed to sit in
warehouses or in grocery coolers. Crackers, however, could — so they added a
handful of cracker rounds to the package. Using cheese was the next obvious
move, given its increased presence in processed foods. But what kind of cheese
would work? Natural Cheddar, which they started off with, crumbled and didn’t
slice very well, so they moved on to processed varieties, which could bend and
be sliced and would last forever, or they could knock another two cents off per
unit by using an even lesser product called “cheese food,” which had lower
scores than processed cheese in taste tests. The cost dilemma was solved when
Oscar Mayer merged with Kraft in 1989 and the company didn’t have to shop for
cheese anymore; it got all the processed cheese it wanted from its new sister company,
and at cost.
Drane’s team moved into a nearby hotel, where they set out
to find the right mix of components and container. They gathered around tables
where bagfuls of meat, cheese, crackers and all sorts of wrapping material had
been dumped, and they let their imaginations run. After snipping and taping
their way through a host of failures, the model they fell back on was the
American TV dinner — and after some brainstorming about names (Lunch Kits?
Go-Packs? Fun Mealz?), Lunchables were born.
The trays flew off the grocery-store shelves. Sales hit a
phenomenal $218 million in the first 12 months, more than anyone was prepared
for. This only brought Drane his next crisis. The production costs were so high
that they were losing money with each tray they produced. So Drane flew to New
York
With production costs trimmed and profits coming in, the
next question was how to expand the franchise, which they did by turning to one
of the cardinal rules in processed food: When in doubt, add sugar. “Lunchables
With Dessert is a logical extension,” an Oscar Mayer official reported to
Philip Morris executives in early 1991. The “target” remained the same as it
was for regular Lunchables — “busy mothers” and “working women,” ages 25 to 49
— and the “enhanced taste” would attract shoppers who had grown bored with the
current trays. A year later, the dessert Lunchable morphed into the Fun Pack,
which would come with a Snickers bar, a package of M&M’s or a Reese’s
Peanut Butter Cup, as well as a sugary drink. The Lunchables team started by
using Kool-Aid and cola and then Capri Sun after Philip
Morris added that drink to its stable of brands.
Eventually, a line of the trays, appropriately called Maxed
Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an
entire day’s recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for
sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar.
When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris,
about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled
and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for
criticism. “One article said something like, ‘If you take Lunchables apart, the
most healthy item in it is the napkin.’ ”
Well, they did have a good bit of fat, I offered “You bet,” he said. “Plus cookies.”
The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers —
through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern —
was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say,
‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well,
that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to
eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the
competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.” (Bible would later
press Kraft to reconsider its reliance on salt, sugar and fat.)
When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful
ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but
quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the
constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or
months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store.
Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and
crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold
poorly and was quickly scrapped.
When I met with Kraft officials in 2011 to discuss their
products and policies on nutrition, they had dropped the Maxed Out line and
were trying to improve the nutritional profile of Lunchables through smaller,
incremental changes that were less noticeable to consumers. Across the
Lunchables line, they said they had reduced the salt, sugar and fat by about 10
percent, and new versions, featuring mandarin-orange and pineapple slices, were
in development. These would be promoted as more healthful versions, with “fresh
fruit,” but their list of ingredients — containing upward of 70 items, with
sucrose, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup and fruit concentrate all in the
same tray — have been met with intense criticism from outside the industry.
One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids
don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to
feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their
parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat
them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown
bags to get right to the sweets.
This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key
concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove
to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into
adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that
excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives. As Bob
Eckert, then the C.E.O. of Kraft, put it in 1999: “Lunchables aren’t about
lunch. It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat,
anytime, anywhere.”
Kraft’s early Lunchables campaign targeted mothers. They
might be too distracted by work to make a lunch, but they loved their kids
enough to offer them this prepackaged gift. But as the focus swung toward kids,
Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different
message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is
all yours.”
With this marketing strategy in place and pizza Lunchables —
the crust in one compartment, the cheese, pepperoni and sauce in others —
proving to be a runaway success, the entire world of fast food suddenly opened
up for Kraft to pursue. They came out with a Mexican-themed Lunchables called
Beef Taco Wraps; a Mini Burgers Lunchables; a Mini Hot Dog Lunchable, which
also happened to provide a way for Oscar Mayer to sell its wieners. By 1999,
pancakes — which included syrup, icing, Lifesavers candy and Tang, for a
whopping 76 grams of sugar — and waffles were, for a time, part of the
Lunchables franchise as well.
Annual sales kept climbing, past $500 million, past $800
million; at last count, including sales in Britain
In the trove of records that document the rise of the
Lunchables and the sweeping change it brought to lunchtime habits, I came
across a photograph of Bob Drane’s daughter, which he had slipped into the
Lunchables presentation he showed to food developers. The picture was taken on
Monica Drane’s wedding day in 1989, and she was standing outside the family’s
home in Madison, a beautiful bride in a white wedding dress, holding one of the
brand-new yellow trays.
During the course of reporting, I finally had a chance to
ask her about it. Was she really that much of a fan? “There must have been some
in the fridge,” she told me. “I probably just took one out before we went to
the church. My mom had joked that it was really like their fourth child, my dad
invested so much time and energy on it.”
Monica Drane had three of her own children by the time we
spoke, ages 10, 14 and 17. “I don’t think my kids have ever eaten a Lunchable,”
she told me. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we
eat very healthfully.”
Drane himself paused only briefly when I asked him if,
looking back, he was proud of creating the trays. “Lots of things are
trade-offs,” he said. “And I do believe it’s easy to rationalize anything. In
the end, I wish that the nutritional profile of the thing could have been
better, but I don’t view the entire project as anything but a positive
contribution to people’s lives.”
Today Bob Drane is still talking to kids about what they
like to eat, but his approach has changed. He volunteers with a nonprofit
organization that seeks to build better communications between school kids and
their parents, and right in the mix of their problems, alongside the academic
struggles, is childhood obesity. Drane has also prepared a précis on the food
industry that he used with medical students at the University
of Wisconsin University
of Wisconsin M.B.A.
At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los
Angeles Feb.
15, 1985 , a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki Finland Finland Finland
Karppanen’s presentation was met with applause, but one man
in the crowd seemed particularly intrigued by the presentation, and as
Karppanen left the stage, the man intercepted him and asked if they could talk
more over dinner. Their conversation later that night was not at all what
Karppanen was expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from
quite a different vantage point: the man’s name was Robert I-San Lin, and from
1974 to 1982, he worked as the chief scientist for Frito-Lay, the nearly
$3-billion-a-year manufacturer of Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos and Fritos.
Lin’s time at Frito-Lay coincided with the first attacks by
nutrition advocates on salty foods and the first calls for federal regulators
to reclassify salt as a “risky” food additive, which could have subjected it to
severe controls. No company took this threat more seriously — or more
personally — than Frito-Lay, Lin explained to Karppanen over their dinner.
Three years after he left Frito-Lay, he was still anguished over his inability
to effectively change the company’s recipes and practices.
By chance, I ran across a letter that Lin sent to Karppanen
three weeks after that dinner, buried in some files to which I had gained
access. Attached to the letter was a memo written when Lin was at Frito-Lay,
which detailed some of the company’s efforts in defending salt. I tracked Lin
down in Irvine , Calif.
Not much had changed by 1986, except Frito-Lay found itself
on a rare cold streak. The company had introduced a series of high-profile
products that failed miserably. Toppels, a cracker with cheese topping;
Stuffers, a shell with a variety of fillings; Rumbles, a bite-size granola
snack — they all came and went in a blink, and the company took a $52 million
hit. Around that time, the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an
expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center
in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that
people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long
enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had
also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is
contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it
changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so
much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the
baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this
suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of
salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off. Along with the rest of the
snack-food industry, Frito-Lay anticipated lower sales because of an aging
population, and marketing plans were adjusted to focus even more intently on
younger consumers.
Except that snack sales didn’t decline as everyone had
projected, Frito-Lay’s doomed product launches notwithstanding. Poring over
data one day in his home office, trying to understand just who was consuming
all the snack food, Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading
things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age
groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less
than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is
how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were
in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s
called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more
encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were
not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged,
their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy,
the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they
ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in
the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The
rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with
the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12
pounds a year.
Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating
real meals had become a thing of the past. Baby boomers, especially, seemed to
have greatly cut down on regular meals. They were skipping breakfast when they
had early-morning meetings. They skipped lunch when they then needed to catch
up on work because of those meetings. They skipped dinner when their kids
stayed out late or grew up and moved out of the house. And when they skipped
these meals, they replaced them with snacks. “We looked at this behavior, and
said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told
me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did
not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category
that has huge growth potential.”
The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new
products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting
consumers to buy more: the line extension. The classic Lay’s potato chips were
joined by Salt & Vinegar, Salt & Pepper and Cheddar & Sour Cream.
They put out Chili-Cheese-flavored Fritos, and Cheetos were transformed into 21
varieties. Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas
To get a better feel for their work, I called on Steven
Witherly, a food scientist who wrote a fascinating guide for industry insiders
titled, “Why Humans Like Junk Food.” I brought him two shopping bags filled
with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,”
Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet,
in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos
that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s
uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,”
Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s
no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
As for their marketing troubles, in a March 2010 meeting,
Frito-Lay executives hastened to tell their Wall Street investors that the 1.4
billion boomers worldwide weren’t being neglected; they were redoubling their
efforts to understand exactly what it was that boomers most wanted in a snack
chip. Which was basically everything: great taste, maximum bliss but minimal
guilt about health and more maturity than puffs. “They snack a lot,”
Frito-Lay’s chief marketing officer, Ann Mukherjee, told the investors. “But
what they’re looking for is very different. They’re looking for new
experiences, real food experiences.” Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip
Company, which was started by a Massachusetts
The Frito-Lay executives also spoke of the company’s ongoing
pursuit of a “designer sodium,” which they hoped, in the near future, would
take their sodium loads down by 40 percent. No need to worry about lost sales
there, the company’s C.E.O., Al Carey, assured their investors. The boomers
would see less salt as the green light to snack like never before.
There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction
of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well
result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is
removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey
said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the
company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest
market of all for snacks: schools. He cited, for example, the school-food
initiative championed by Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association, which
is seeking to improve the nutrition of school food by limiting its load of
salt, sugar and fat. “Imagine this,” Carey said. “A potato chip that tastes
great and qualifies for the Clinton-A.H.A. alliance for schools . . . . We
think we have ways to do all of this on a potato chip, and imagine getting that
product into schools, where children can have this product and grow up with it
and feel good about eating it.”
Carey’s quote reminded me of something I read in the early
stages of my reporting, a 24-page report prepared for Frito-Lay in 1957 by a
psychologist named Ernest Dichter. The company’s chips, he wrote, were not
selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and
enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously,
people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.”
Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop
eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and
messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and
they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions,
which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the
entire industry. Dichter suggested that Frito-Lay avoid using the word “fried”
in referring to its chips and adopt instead the more healthful-sounding term
“toasted.” To counteract the “fear of letting oneself go,” he suggested
repacking the chips into smaller bags. “The more-anxious consumers, the ones
who have the deepest fears about their capacity to control their appetite, will
tend to sense the function of the new pack and select it,” he said.
Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm
of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the
American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a
part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be
encouraged in a concentrated way,” Dichter said, citing a string of examples:
“potato chips with soup, with fruit or vegetable juice appetizers; potato chips
served as a vegetable on the main dish; potato chips with salad; potato chips
with egg dishes for breakfast; potato chips with sandwich orders.”
In 2011, The New England Journal of Medicine published a
study that shed new light on America
If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small
amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because
so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then
relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to
unwind. More than 30 years have passed since Robert Lin first tangled with
Frito-Lay on the imperative of the company to deal with the formulation of its
snacks, but as we sat at his dining-room table, sifting through his records,
the feelings of regret still played on his face. In his view, three decades had
been lost, time that he and a lot of other smart scientists could have spent
searching for ways to ease the addiction to salt, sugar and fat. “I couldn’t do
much about it,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for the public.”
IV. ‘These People Need a Lot of
Things, but They Don’t Need a Coke.’
The growing attention Americans are paying to what they put
into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the processed-food
companies to address health concerns. Pressed by the Obama administration and
consumers, Kraft, Nestlé, Pepsi, Campbell
One of the other executives I spoke with at length was
Jeffrey Dunn, who, in 2001, at age 44, was directing more than half of
Coca-Cola’s $20 billion in annual sales as president and chief operating officer
in both North and South America . In an effort to control
as much market share as possible, Coke extended its aggressive marketing to
especially poor or vulnerable areas of the U.S., like New Orleans — where
people were drinking twice as much Coke as the national average — or Rome, Ga.,
where the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day. In Coke’s
headquarters in Atlanta
One of Dunn’s lieutenants, Todd Putman, who worked at
Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely
beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people
drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down
to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies
more often?” (In response to Putman’s remarks, Coke said its goals have changed
and that it now focuses on providing consumers with more low- or no-calorie
products.)
In his capacity, Dunn was making frequent trips to Brazil Brazil
Dunn returned to Atlanta
Dunn told me that talking about Coke’s business today was by
no means easy and, because he continues to work in the food business, not
without risk. “You really don’t want them mad at you,” he said. “And I don’t
mean that, like, I’m going to end up at the bottom of the bay. But they don’t
have a sense of humor when it comes to this stuff. They’re a very, very
aggressive company.”
When I met with Dunn, he told me not just about his years at
Coke but also about his new marketing venture. In April 2010, he met with three
executives from Madison Dearborn Partners, a private-equity firm based in Chicago San
Joaquin Valley
He explained how he would deploy strategic storytelling in
the ad campaign for this snack, using a key phrase that had been developed with
much calculation: “Eat ’Em Like Junk Food.”
After 45 minutes, Dunn clicked off the last slide and
thanked the men for coming. Madison
The snack that Dunn was proposing to sell: carrots. Plain,
fresh carrots. No added sugar. No creamy sauce or dips. No salt. Just baby
carrots, washed, bagged, then sold into the deadly dull produce aisle.
“We act like a snack, not a vegetable,” he told the
investors. “We exploit the rules of junk food to fuel the baby-carrot
conversation. We are pro-junk-food behavior but anti-junk-food establishment.”
The investors were thinking only about sales. They had
already bought one of the two biggest farm producers of baby carrots in the
country, and they’d hired Dunn to run the whole operation. Now, after his
pitch, they were relieved. Dunn had figured out that using the industry’s own
marketing ploys would work better than anything else. He drew from the bag of
tricks that he mastered in his 20 years at Coca-Cola, where he learned one of
the most critical rules in processed food: The selling of food matters as much
as the food itself.
Later, describing his new line of work, Dunn told me he was
doing penance for his Coca-Cola years. “I’m paying my karmic debt,” he said.
