[Vision2020] The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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February 20, 2013
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food By MICHAEL
MOSS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/michael_moss/index.html>

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.

 In This Article:
• ‘In This Field, I’m a Game
Changer.’<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all#1>
• ‘Lunchtime Is All
Yours’<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all#2>
• ‘It’s Called Vanishing Caloric
Density.’<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all#3>
• ‘These People Need a Lot of Things, but They Don’t Need a
Coke.’<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all#4>

 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.

This article is adapted from “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants
Hooked Us<http://michaelmossbooks.com/>,”
which will be published by Random House this month.

Michael Moss <mossm at nytimes.com> is an investigative reporter for The
Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for his reporting on the meat
industry.

Editor: Joel Lovell <joel.lovell at nytimes.com>




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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