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.
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