The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
Grant Cornett for The New York Times
Published: February 20, 2013
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.
Grant Cornett for The New York Times; Prop Stylist: Janine Iversen
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.
