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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food By MICHAEL MOSS FEB. 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.

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

spin off, 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,” which will be published by Random House this month.

Michael Moss is an investigative reporter for The Times. He won a

Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for his reporting on the meat industry.

Editor: Joel Lovell

A version of this article appears in print on February 24, 2013, on Page MM34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: (Salt + Fat 2 / Satisfying Crunch) x Pleasing Mouth Feel = A Food Designed to Addict.

© 2017 The New York Times Company

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Additional Resources

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Use the APA manual, organization’s website and their annual report and our textbook for the definition of mission statement

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