On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis
pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11
men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in
attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter &
Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and
company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the
agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with
it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly
friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one
another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive
space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.
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’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and
rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke
recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was
a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the
same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like
this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had
scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest
essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical
guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people
talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They
don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They
want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”
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.
I. ‘In This Field, I’m a Game Changer.’
John Lennon couldn’t find it in England, so he had cases of it shipped
from New York to fuel the “Imagine” sessions. The Beach Boys, ZZ Top and
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 mother of
three wrote on a blog to warn other Peppers away. “It’s disgusting.
Gagging. Never again.”
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, where for more than three
decades he has “optimized” a variety of products for Campbell Soup,
General Foods, Kraft and PepsiCo. “I’ve optimized soups,” Moskowitz told
me. “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles.
In this field, I’m a game changer.”
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.: “After . . . months and months, he had a mountain of
data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. . . . And
sure enough, if you sit down and you analyze all this data on spaghetti
sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups.
There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain. There are people
who like their spaghetti sauce spicy. And there are people who like it
extra-chunky. And of those three facts, the third one was the most
significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a
supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego
turned to Howard, and they said, ‘Are you telling me that one-third of
Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce, and yet no one is
servicing their needs?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And Prego then went back and
completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line
of extra-chunky that immediately and completely took over the
spaghetti-sauce business in this country. . . . That is Howard’s gift to
the American people. . . . He fundamentally changed the way the food
industry thinks about making you happy.”
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 supplied the ingredients, including the
salt, sugar and, for some versions, fat, while Moskowitz supplied the
optimization. “More is not necessarily better,” Moskowitz wrote in his
own account of the Prego project. “As the sensory intensity (say, of
sweetness) increases, consumers first say that they like the product
more, but eventually, with a middle level of sweetness, consumers like
the product the most (this is their optimum, or ‘bliss,’ point).”
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 offices as he and his vice president for research, Michele
Reisner, walked me through the Dr Pepper campaign. Cadbury wanted its
new flavor to have cherry and vanilla on top of the basic Dr Pepper
taste. Thus, there were three main components to play with. A sweet
cherry flavoring, a sweet vanilla flavoring and a sweet syrup known as
“Dr Pepper flavoring.”
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 and Philadelphia. The Dr Pepper tasters began working through
their samples, resting five minutes between each sip to restore their
taste buds. After each sample, they gave numerically ranked answers to a
set of questions: How much did they like it overall? How strong is the
taste? How do they feel about the taste? How would they describe the
quality of this product? How likely would they be to purchase this
product?
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., where executives worried about their
future and the pressure they faced from their new bosses at Philip
Morris.
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 and went
through the records he had kept on the birth of what would become much
more than his solution to the company’s meat problem. In 1985, when
Drane began working on the project, his orders were to “figure out how
to contemporize what we’ve got.”
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, where he met with Philip Morris officials who promised
to give him the money he needed to keep it going. “The hard thing is to
figure out something that will sell,” he was told. “You’ll figure out
how to get the cost right.” Projected to lose $6 million in 1991, the
trays instead broke even; the next year, they earned $8 million.
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, they were approaching the $1
billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own
category. Eventually, more than 60 varieties of Lunchables and other
brands of trays would show up in the grocery stores. In 2007, Kraft even
tried a Lunchables Jr. for 3- to 5-year-olds.
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. And while he does not name his
Lunchables in this document, and cites numerous causes for the obesity
epidemic, he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University
of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his
presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to
buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How
do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our
limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to
deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins.
Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in
‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”
III. ‘It’s Called Vanishing Caloric Density.’
At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on Feb. 15, 1985,
a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki named Heikki Karppanen told
the remarkable story of Finland’s effort to address its salt habit. In
the late 1970s, the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating
on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a result, the
country had developed significant issues with high blood pressure, and
men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal
cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague
was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle —
it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved
to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The
Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would
come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By
2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third,
and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a
75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes
and heart disease.)
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., where we spent several days going
through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten
notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin
had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to
address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin
and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive
consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than
one occasion, “people get addicted to salt.”
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, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and
technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year, and
the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on questions of
crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools
included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and
perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point:
people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per
square inch.
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 couple
who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their
customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips
averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s
recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among
boomers.
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’s weight gain. The subjects — 120,877 women and
men — were all professionals in the health field, and were likely to be
more conscious about nutrition, so the findings might well understate
the overall trend. Using data back to 1986, the researchers monitored
everything the participants ate, as well as their physical activity and
smoking. They found that every four years, the participants exercised
less, watched TV more and gained an average of 3.35 pounds. The
researchers parsed the data by the caloric content of the foods being
eaten, and found the top contributors to weight gain included red meat
and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and potatoes, including
mashed and French fries. But the largest weight-inducing food was the
potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain
with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an
additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines
to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,”
Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the
Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me.
“More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn,
causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a
craving for more.
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 and General Mills, among
others, have begun to trim the loads of salt, sugar and fat in many
products. And with consumer advocates pushing for more government
intervention, Coca-Cola made headlines in January by releasing ads that
promoted its bottled water and low-calorie drinks as a way to counter
obesity. Predictably, the ads drew a new volley of scorn from critics
who pointed to the company’s continuing drive to sell sugary Coke.
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, the biggest consumers were referred to as
“heavy users.” “The other model we use was called ‘drinks and drinkers,’
” Dunn said. “How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they
drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to
stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low
velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more
efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”
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, where the
company had recently begun a push to increase consumption of Coke among
the many Brazilians living in favelas. The company’s strategy
was to repackage Coke into smaller, more affordable 6.7-ounce bottles,
just 20 cents each. Coke was not alone in seeing Brazil as a potential
boon; Nestlé began deploying battalions of women to travel poor
neighborhoods, hawking American-style processed foods door to door. But
Coke was Dunn’s concern, and on one trip, as he walked through one of
the impoverished areas, he had an epiphany. “A voice in my head says,
‘These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I
almost threw up.”
Dunn returned to Atlanta, determined to make some changes. He didn’t
want to abandon the soda business, but he did want to try to steer the
company into a more healthful mode, and one of the things he pushed for
was to stop marketing Coke in public schools. The independent companies
that bottled Coke viewed his plans as reactionary. A director of one
bottler wrote a letter to Coke’s chief executive and board asking for
Dunn’s head. “He said what I had done was the worst thing he had seen in
50 years in the business,” Dunn said. “Just to placate these crazy
leftist school districts who were trying to keep people from having
their Coke. He said I was an embarrassment to the company, and I should
be fired.” In February 2004, he was.
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 with a wide-ranging portfolio of investments. They recently
hired Dunn to run one of their newest acquisitions — a food producer in
the San Joaquin Valley. As they sat in the hotel’s meeting room, the men
listened to Dunn’s marketing pitch. He talked about giving the product a
personality that was bold and irreverent, conveying the idea that this
was the ultimate snack food. He went into detail on how he would target a
special segment of the 146 million Americans who are regular snackers —
mothers, children, young professionals — people, he said, who “keep
their snacking ritual fresh by trying a new food product when it catches
their attention.”
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’s portfolio contained the largest Burger King
franchise in the world, the Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain and a
processed-food maker called AdvancePierre whose lineup includes the
Jamwich, a peanut-butter-and-jelly contrivance that comes frozen,
crustless and embedded with four kinds of sugars.
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.
