Ellen Wartella was never one for processed foods. She took cooking classes, and both she and her husband loved to spend time in the kitchen. Together, they plied their two sons with homemade dinners, and while she tolerated their fondness for junk food and things that came in a box, she didn’t exactly encourage it. “When my kids were growing up, we bought Kraft Macaroni & Cheese because they loved it,” she said. “And I remember being appalled by that.”
In middle school, she recalled, one of her sons swooned for another of Kraft’s mega-hits, Lunchables, especially the version with pizza. His crush, however, soon extinguished itself. By the time they reached high school in the late 1990s, both boys had been exposed to the dark side of public health and marketing. They came to loathe the cigarette companies, in particular, for deliberately hooking the country on a habit that killed people in horrible, untimely ways.
Wartella worked as the dean of the College of Communications at the University of Texas in Austin, where she had amassed some opinions of her own regarding industrial marketing. She had spent thirty years researching the affects of media on children, including TV violence and advertising, and her twelve books and 175 reports and papers had made her one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. In 2003, she got a call, out of the blue, from a senior executive from Kraft. He asked her if she would join a panel of health and marketing experts that the company was putting together for guidance on how to deal with obesity. The panel sounded to Wartella like something the august Institute of Medicine might assemble to examine a health crisis: Kraft had recruited two medical doctors versed in diabetes and public health, a psychologist who studied behavior and obesity, and a food nutrition researcher who specialized in obesity and heart disease — nine experts in all, with Wartella being asked to make it an even ten.
At the time, Kraft had two people acting as CEO, and both issued statements when the panel was formed explaining why the largest food company in the world was undertaking a mission that heretofore had fallen squarely within the domain of government, not private industry. “The council will give Kraft access to a range of important voices from outside the company,” said Betsy Holden, one of the CEOs, “who can play an invaluable role in helping us develop our response to the global challenge of obesity.” To which her partner, Roger Deromedi, added: “We welcome the council’s knowledge, insight, and judgment, all of which will help us strengthen the alignment of our products and marketing practices with societal needs.”
Wartella was heartened by the notion of a publicly traded company talking about society’s needs and actually taking steps to learn how it might better serve them. Companies, after all, existed to make money for their stockholders, and Kraft was tied to one of the biggest moneymakers of them all: Philip Morris. The tobacco giant had owned Kraft for fifteen years, and this was a problem for Wartella’s kids. When she told them she’d been invited to join the panel, they responded with outrage. “Both my boys were appalled at the idea of my joining an advisory board for Kraft, because both my children are very antismoking,” she told me. “They said, ‘How could you work for a company that is pushing cigarettes?’ ”
Wartella, however, had an inkling she might be able to do some good. She was no expert on obesity, but Kraft was a principal player in a recent development she had been tracking with increasing dismay: the targeting of vulnerable kids through the use of online games and various social media marketing schemes. “My early research was all on helping young children distinguish between the editorial content of TV and the persuasive intent of the advertisements, which they have difficulty separating,” she told me. “Now, these new strategies were comin g along that completely erased that.”
And kids were responding. Obesity was setting all sorts of records in 2003. The average adult was 24 pounds heavier than in 1960. One in three Americans—and nearly one in five kids, aged six to eleven—were classified as obese. As scientists poked at and measured the obesity crisis, one fact emerged from their studies that shocked people more than any other: Obesity was a lasting, seemingly incurable affliction. Kids who were overweight tended to stay that way for life.
Despite the proclamations from Kraft’s CEOs and her conversations with the Kraft executive who wanted her to join the advisory panel, Wartella had her doubts about the sincerity of Kraft’s undertaking. How could she not? Expert after expert was pointing the finger at processed food, and until now, Kraft had joined the rest of the industry in ducking blame. Why should she believe all this talk about society’s needs? Wartella finally decided to join the advisory group, but only after making a vow to herself and her kids: She would quit if it turned out to be more of the same old obfuscation.
After the group’s first two meetings at Kraft’s headquarters near Chicago, Wartella’s fears about the company’s sincerity seemed to be justified. The talks roamed across the landscape of obesity, but only broadly, touching on nutrition, exercise, and portion sizes. Always, the conversation was deferential toward Kraft, the $35 billion elephant in the room. This changed, however, in the third session. Wartella had been asked to discuss marketing, and she arrived having done her homework. The session started out with Kraft officials presenting a rosy view of the company’s practices, which included a policy of not advertising to children younger than six. Wartella begged to differ.
In truth, she said, Kraft’s own websites were riddled with tricks that lured young kids to their sweetest and fattiest produ cts. She cited games that entailed counting up Oreos, or going on hide-and-seek missions to find Barney Rubble, whose role in the game was to tout the company’s Fruity Pebbles cereal. These were marketing tricks that clearly circumvented the self-imposed advertising ban on children, she said, as did the company’s use of cartoon characters to hawk its mac and cheese and cookies. Even its packaging was decorated with Shrek and Dora the Explorer, the better to seduce young kids.
“I pointed this out, and I said, ‘You are at best disingenuous, and at worst you’re outright lying.’ The nutrition scientists and the other people on the advisory board were kind of appalled by the strength of my statements. One or two people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘They’re going to get you off this thing.’ ”
But that did not happen. The officials at Kraft listened. Not only that, they asked Wartella to dig even deeper into the company’s marketing practices and come back with more stinging critiques, which she did. Wartella came to believe that her original fears were unfounded. The panel was making a difference, and Kraft seemed to be, incredibly, starting to address the ways its own practices were contributing to the obesity crisis.
This was no small thing. For the processed food industry, 2003 was shaping up to be a furious, competitive race to boost America’s consumption of its products. Not only were wars taking place in which the sole objective was to flood the grocery aisles with items with ever higher loads of salt, sugar, and fat, a huge new player in groceries had accelerated the competition for space on the shelf. Wal-Mart had begun selling food, and just since 2000 the retailing giant had boosted its grocery, candy, and tobacco sales by 46 percent to $39.4 billion, sending food manufacturers rushing to the company’s headquarters in Arkansas to pitch their wares. The big manufacturers were in a separate race to the bottom when it came to the economics of food, seeking out new ways to cut their ingredient costs, lower the price of their food, and thus turn processed food into the only logical choice shoppers could make.
Kraft was no stranger to this contest. Its product managers were turning out some of the most enticing, supersized, and cheapest items of all, from the fruit drink called Capri Sun (later “up-sized” to the Big Pouch) to the fat-laden Lunchables (expanded into the Maxed Out size) to the Cheese Stuffed Crust Supreme DiGiorno frozen pizza (with three meats added to with the extra cheese, delivering more than two days’ worth of the recommended maximum of saturated fat and sodium in a single pie weighing nearly two pounds). “Build and defend,” was the rallying cry in Kraft’s internal pep talks. “Drive consumption.”
Inside this same company, however, a heretical view had emerged. Starting in the late 1990s, a small group of senior Kraft officials had been watching America’s massive weight gain with growing alarm. They didn’t buy the industry’s view that consumers were to blame for the obesity crisis by being slothful or lacking in willpower. The small group of insiders had a different take on America’s gluttony. Some were emotionally vested, believing that they had an ethical and moral imperative to help resolve the epidemic of obesity, for which their industry was in large part responsible. Others made a more practical argument: The consumer backlash on processed foods, when it came, would exact a heavy toll on the company’s profits. “We were trying to convince senior management that we would be better off in the long run if we gave up a little to save a lot, in terms of our long-term business reputation and success,” said Kathleen Spear, a senior vice president and member of this cabal at Kraft.
The group got Kraft to empanel the experts, and it then used their testimony as ammunition in convincing Kraft to act. At first, the steps the company took were modest in scope, starting with urging restraint in the company’s marketing strategies. But that was just window dressing. In order to change the company, these Kraft officials quickly realized, they had to confront the fundamental nature — the heart and soul — of processed food.
Since its earliest days, Kraft had directed every last shred of its talent and energy toward making its products as enticing as possible. Central to this mission were the formulations of salt, sugar, and fat that made the products attractive. The bliss point was no abstraction. Kraft’s legacy was built on doing this bigger and better than any other manufacturer. Yet this was precisely where the Kraft officials concerned about obesity saw they would have to go: into the actual product formulations, and their loads of salt, sugar, and fat. What if these formulations were causing people to buy and eat too much? they asked. Could they find a way to help people ease up without killing off their own company?
Had federal regulators dared to ask these questions, they would have been branded as traitors to free enterprise. This was, after all, the most sacrosanct part of the business, the most staunchly defended. The insiders who worried about obesity had to tread very carefully in how they parsed the issue at hand: the desire created by their products. “We’re a food business,” Spear recalled thinking. “We wanted people to delight in the taste of everything we made, particularly when it came to snacks and cookies. We were mindful that we were selling confectionaries and snacks and not rice cakes. It was never, ‘Gee, we ought to cut back on the allure.’ Rather, it was, ‘We ought to make sure we’re not directly or indirectly or subliminally encouraging overconsumption.’ ”
However the equation was approached, the idea of a food giant exploring the question of how to get people to eat less was astonishing, and in the coming months Kraft would dive more deeply into the psychology of overeating than any manufacturer had ever gone before. But as I examined this extraordinary moment at Kraft, it became apparent that there was yet another force at play influencing the company’s decisions. For years, much of Kraft’s motivation in getting people to eat more of its convenience foods had come from the bosses at Philip Morris. The tobacco executives encouraged them to find ever more potent ways to attract consumers and then applauded the victories when sales surged. They even supplied Kraft with their own marketing apparatus and strategies that had been so successful in selling cigarettes—precisely the relationship that Ellen Wartella’s boys had disdained in trying to stop her from joining the panel on obesity.
But behind the scenes, in the private rooms where the most senior officials gathered to account for their actions and receive their guidance for going forward, a dramatic shift occurred. In this confidential setting, I discovered — from secret documents and interviews with officials who spoke publicly for the first time on these matters — the same tobacco-steeped overlords in New York who had spent their own careers promoting cigarettes and denying addiction did the unthinkable: They fell in with the cabal and began urging Kraft to make changes in response to the growing epidemic of obesity.
Salt, sugar, and fat may have been the formula that carried Kraft to the apex of the processed food industry, the tobacco men said. But just as nicotine had turned on them, becoming a yoke that sunk their profits, so too would salt, sugar, and fat become Kraft’s millstones, dragging the whole company down with them.
In 1925, an advertisement began appearing in newspapers and magazines across America. It depicted a slim woman with short hair standing on a diving board, clad in a one-piece bathing suit, looking pleased with her herself. But next to her, in shadow, stood her future self: dowdy and obese. “This Is You Five Years From Now!” read the caption. “When Tempted to Over-indulge, Reach for a Lucky Instead.”
The ad, for Lucky Strike cigarettes, was made by American Tobacco, which was the first cigarette manufacturer to realize that obesity could be used as a marketing cudgel. Until then, smoking had been an overwhelmingly male pastime. But in looking to expand sales, the cigarette manufacturers began pitching tobacco to women as an appetite suppressant. The industry eventually stopped making all health claims, deciding at a 1953 summit that some of the ads — especially those touting filtered smoke as “better for your health” — were hurting sales by implying that smoking posed risks. So when Philip Morris introduced its own brand for women, Virginia Slims, in 1968, it took the more subtle route of associating the cigarette with women of style, women who were elegant, successful, slim. Only internally did Philip Morris spell out the unspoken allures, which included the brand’s weight-loss appeal. The marketing slogans it tested on focus groups included concepts like this: “A satisfying cigarette, specifically made to curb your appetite for food.”
As the health risks in smoking became more apparent, there was even a brief time when cigarette makers saw fat as a potential ally. Researchers had begun connecting lung cancer to diets high in fat, and the interest this generated among tobacco executives was understandable, given how it might take some of the heat off cigarettes. One study — funded by the National Cancer Institute—examined the dietary and smoking habits of people in forty-three countries and found a correlation between fat and lung cancer that might help explain why Japan — with its high level of smoking but low-fat diets—had less lung cancer than the United States. “High fat diets may promote lung tumors by decreasing normal ability to destroy new cancer,” the study said. Any comfort this might have been to the tobacco industry, however, was especially short-lived for Philip Morris. When this study came out in 1986, executives there marked their copy “very confidential” before adding it to their files. Philip Morris was no longer just a tobacco company. It was on the way to becoming the country’s largest manufacturer of processed foods as well. This gave it a much different view of fat. The firestorm that would later envelop the tobacco industry was still only a string of scattered lawsuits and pesky critics that Philip Morris felt confident it could contain. In the 1980s, when it started buying the food giants, Philip Morris saw them less as a replacement for tobacco than as an opportunity to supplement its own burgeoning stable of blockbuster brands. That said, the food brands did have an issue the Philip Morris executives quickly recognized as something they would have to deal with, just as they were having to deal with nicotine: saturated fat, which was starting to rival sugar as a public health concern. Within a few years, the top Philip Morris officials began referring to fat not as an ally but as a matter of concern that, like nicotine, needed careful tending.
In 1990, the battalion of attorneys who worked for Philip Morris gathered for a retreat in La Jolla, California, where the company’s general counsel, Fred Newman, issued a call to arms. The Marlboro brand, he said, “ranks as one of the great product success stories of all time,” having skyrocketed from a 1 percent share of the cigarette market in 1954 to 26 percent that year; the number of smokers it had attracted equaled the population of New England plus the cities of Dallas, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. But as an expanding conglomerate, he added, Philip Morris was saddled with a slew of new consumer issues. “These concerns involve not just tobacco, but also alcohol, red meat, dairy products, saturated fat, sugar, sodium, caffeine, and other common ingredients in many of our products,” he said. “You already know a great deal about the challenges we face in the tobacco business—challenges ranging from excise taxes and disputes over labeling, marketing, and advertising restrictions to product liability. In the future, we can expect these challenges to also confront us in alcoholic beverages and food. And, as these brand categories come to represent larger and larger parts of our business, our need to protect our interest in them will also rise proportionately. Clearly, many of the people in this room will have a key role to play in building and maintaining our interests in these areas. Your actions on that ultimate battleground—the courtroom—will have impact all over the country. Growth from working together is the cornerstone of the future success of all the companies and brands of Philip Morris.”
That same year, in addressing the food-side managers at Philip Morris, the chief executive, Hamish Maxwell, said that they — like the company’s attorneys — would also have to be sensitive and responsive to a wide range of public concerns. “As new management coming into our companies, I’m sure you also have thought about public health concerns and some of the more controversial aspects of our business,” he said. “We want to respond to the whole range of consumer concerns. We’ve modified our food products to remove fat or lessen the calories, and we’ve developed lighter cigarette products.”
To be sure, in these early days of handling fat, Philip Morris viewed the public’s worries as entirely manageable. It merely had to deploy a strategy, used by the entire consumer goods industry, known as the line extension: When people clamor loudly enough for healthier products, enough so that they are willing to sacrifice some of the pleasure these products provided, companies produce a better-for-you formulation. Whether it’s low-tar cigarettes, low-calorie beer, or lower-fat potato chips, these healthier versions are no threat to the mainline products. In fact, if done right, they can boost sales for the original full-calorie and full-fat versions by attracting new shoppers to the overall brand. The food managers working for Philip Morris put line extensions in motion throughout the grocery store.
As for the mainline versions of its brands, Philip Morris showed little inclination to do anything but market these products with all the skill and vigor that had once made Marlboro such a resounding success. Having learned with cigarettes that being first was not as important as being quick and aggressive in responding to trends, Philip Morris urged this same tactic upon its food managers. If Americans were craving foods that were fast and convenient, Philip Morris wouldn’t try merely to best its competitors in the grocery store; it would aim to capture a piece of the huge market owned by the fast food chains, adopting their formulations and, in some cases, even their mega-brands. Among these achievements was an ultra-convenient meal called the Taco Bell dinner kit — a boxed set of tortillas, cheese sauces, and recipes that Kraft started selling in 1996 after acquiring the rights to the brand name. With clinical precision, Philip Morris touted these efforts to Wall Street.
“In order to continue to deliver strong financial performance, Kraft will need to respond to several major environmental trends,” the chief operating officer, William Webb, told a gathering of investors and analysts in 1999. “First, consumers are becoming busier. Seventy-seven percent of women in the U.S. age 25 to 54 are now in the work force, versus 51 percent in 1970, and this is expected to increase to about 80 percent by the year 2010. As consumers have gotten busier, the number of meals prepared at home has declined. Since 1990 the average consumer is preparing one half of a meal less per week at home, preferring instead to eat out or take-out from restaurants or other food-away-from-home venues. Kraft is responding to this trend. For example, we’re helping busy consumers with an extensive lineup of easy-to-prepare meal products like Taco Bell dinner kits, Easy Mac single-serve macaroni and cheese, and Lunchables lunch combinations; ready-to-eat snacks like Jell-O pudding, Handi-Snacks gels and Kraft cheese cubes; and ready-to-drink beverages like Capri Sun, Kool-Aid Bursts and Kool-Aid Splash. We also know that the number one question in America at 4 P.M. is not, ‘How did the market do today?’ It’s, ‘What’s for dinner?’ And most consumers don’t have a clue.” The Taco Bell kits, he noted, had quickly reached $125 million in annual sales.
But even as Philip Morris pushed more fatty products into the American diet, its executives were tracking the public’s concern about how fat, as well as salt and sugar, related to obesity. And on this front the news was growing increasingly worrisome. Between the 1960s and 1980s, obesity rates had held fairly steady. Among children, it hovered around 5 percent. In 1980, however, the rates had begun to surge for all ages. Moreover, the media was starting to draw the public’s attention to the implications of the country’s weight gain. Philip Morris had long used tracking surveys to monitor issues of public concern, and when obesity was added to the list of questions in 1999, the company’s polling identified it as a significant threat to the manufacture of processed food: Eight in ten people viewed obesity as a serious risk to public health. And while one in three cited “lack of exercise” as a cause, a far greater number of people, nearly half of the respondents, blamed “unbalanced diets.” In other words, too much fatty and sugary food.
“Obesity is literally an epidemic in this country, and some people’s ideas for addressing this public health issue could directly or indirectly affect the entire agriculture industry, from farm to consumer,” a Philip Morris vice president, Jay Poole, warned an agricultural economics group that year. “They’re talking about punitive taxes on certain foodstuffs, limits on marketing of certain foods, regulation of others.”
Just as Philip Morris was gearing up to defend its food from attacks like these, however, the nature of its battle over cigarettes took a sudden turn, an event that altered the company’s view on how Kraft should deal with obesity. Through much of the 1990s, the tobacco giant had remained steadfast in its determination to fight the antismoking lawsuits being brought by individuals and the government alike. It might not win every case, the company would tell investors, but the damage would be contained. Then a lawsuit emerged to end all tobacco lawsuits. It was brought by more than forty states, whose health-care systems were buckling from having to cover the growing numbers of people made sick by smoking-induced illnesses. The states accused the tobacco industry of a wide range of deceptive and fraudulent practices, and they rallied behind Mississippi’s formidable attorney general, Mike Moore, who said that the lawsuit was “premised on a simple notion: You caused the health crisis, you pay for it.” In 1998, the states won. Philip Morris joined the other big tobacco manufacturers in settling the litigation by agreeing to pay the states a stunning $365 billion to revive their moribund health care systems. They also agreed to endure possible regulation of cigarettes by the FDA and to add stronger warnings on their cigarette packs.
What worried Philip Morris even more than this states’ case, however, was the sea change in public opinion that seemed to arise from the accusations of fraud and deception. Where people used to see smoking as a willful decision by individuals, they were now starting to hold the industry responsible, given their marketing tactics and the foreknowledge they had about smoking’s risks. In the months after the settlement, tacticians at Philip Morris conducted a sweeping review of the company’s operations, producing a 1999 strategy paper that they dubbed “Lessons from the Tobacco Wars.”
This manifesto called for a new accommodation to consumers on the part of Philip Morris: “Pay close attention to public concerns and, most important, address them. Denial is not enough, think about solutions. It’s like good marketing. Don’t argue with the customer. Respond to the customer’s need and belief. Our business interest lies with public acceptance.” While nicotine had become a yoke around the tobacco industry’s neck, the strategy paper warned, the food divisions were saddled with more than just one big potential disaster. They had three, or more. “The media are ready and eager to write alarming stories about fat, salt, sugar, or biotech products in people’s diets,” it said. “And just because your critics are shrill or even slightly nuts — and just because some reporters are irresponsible — does not mean you can afford to ignore them. They won’t go away by themselves. If your opponents do enough shoveling — while you just stand there shaking your head — some of the stuff they throw at you will stick. And before long, the public may not be able to see you through the muck.”
The person in charge of Philip Morris during this tumultuous period was Geoffrey Bible, who was also the one tobacco executive who knew the most about the company’s food business, having spent eighteen months at Kraft’s operations center near Chicago. Now, in 2001, as the chief executive of Philip Morris, he drew on this experience in handling the food managers as they faced the growing public concern about the health effects of their foods. “We’d been through a pretty hard time,” Bible told me. “You need to have been there to understand it. Eyes were being focused upon food, and so we were asking, ‘If we are working hard to align our tobacco business with what we call society’s needs, how does the food industry look?’ Because we don’t need to go through the ringer again.”
One of the main lessons from the tobacco wars had to do with Philip Morris’s relations with other tobacco companies — or, rather, the lack thereof. Instead of relations, there was growing suspicion and alarm. When Philip Morris took the step of publicly accepting some responsibility for the public health crisis caused by smoking, its rivals looked darkly upon its motives. They saw it at best as a public relations gambit, and at worst, a ploy to buy time so that Philip Morris could shift more of its focus to selling tobacco overseas, where there was less public concern about lung cancer. For this reason, Philip Morris also assumed that it would be on its own — nay-sayed and nit-picked by its rivals — when it came to handling the food division’s problem.
So Bible did not try to engage the whole food industry on obesity. Nor did he simply come out and order his food managers to act, having learned from his time in Chicago that they did not have the same depth of loyalty to the company as did executives in the tobacco industry. “The food people were a different breed,” he said. “There’s not the same sort of allegiance that we had in our company. It’s also very hard to convince them of things. They’d say, ‘Well, you don’t understand, it’s what the consumer wants, and you’ve got to make it.’ So it’s balancing your business objectives and targets with what’s the right product for the consumer.”
Rather, Bible began to talk more subtly about salt, sugar, and fat—about the high levels to which Americans had become accustomed; about how “the right product for consumers would probably have no sugar, and no fat, but you’d have no sales”; about how Kraft could perhaps best position itself by straddling the line between junk and health foods, “finding something in the middle.” He began speaking like this in private discussions with Kraft officials, including a man named John Ruff, a Kraft executive and food product developer who had joined General Foods in 1972. World-wise and savvy, Ruff listened with mixed emotions, finding it difficult at first to swallow Philip Morris’s sudden about-face on food. It was hard not to think begrudgingly, Who are you to be telling us about corporate responsibility? “Most of us had lived through and watched Philip Morris for many, many years, basically saying, ‘We make a legal product and we inform people of the risks, and it’s not our fault, blah, blah, blah,’ ” Ruff told me. “That was the defense, for many years, and Geoff Bible, initially that was his perspective.”
The more Bible talked, however, the more his message began to resonate. Ruff recalled one moment in 2001 when Bible explained in some detail the company’s change of heart on tobacco. “He talked about why Philip Morris had gone through this mental mind check,” Ruff told me. “And he said, ‘For many years we had had this “not our fault” point of view. But what we started to see is that more and more consumers were feeling like we were partly to blame, and we needed to do something about that.’ ”
That a company’s own loyal customers would suddenly turn against it was a nightmarish concept that riveted the Kraft officials. Then Bible, having described the price being paid by tobacco for ignoring the public sentiment for so many years, cut to the chase. The same day of public reckoning was now likely to befall processed food, he said. The only difference was the nature of the public health concern. For cigarettes it had been cancer. “My prediction,” Bible told his food executives, “is it’s going to happen in the food industry around obesity.’ ”
In 2003, six years before he retired from Kraft as a senior vice president, John Ruff paid a visit to his orthopedist to see about the pain he’d been having while he exercised. The cartilage in his knee, the doctor told him after his MRI exam, was nearly gone. Daily workouts had long been his strategy to avoid getting fat, and even at that he was failing. He had run at least three miles a day for twenty years to “offset the excesses in diet and travel, and I was still overweight,” he told me. Now, on his doctor’s advice, he could only walk and bike, which would burn fewer calories. “I had to do something about my intake, and that’s when I started to change all my eating habits,” he said.
His new diet called for avoiding his own company’s products in the grocery store.
Ruff knew about the emerging research in nutrition that found that the body’s weight control systems were much less adept at handling liquid calories than solid food, so he stopped drinking anything with added sugar. He also dropped high-fat, high-calorie snacks. “I used to come home from work and get one of those giant bags of potato chips,” he said. “The little bags are two servings, so god knows what the giant one is. There’s probably 800 calories in there, and twice the amount of fat you need. Along with a martini, I would consume half that bag. On a good day I could eat the whole damn thing.” Instead, Ruff swapped the martinis for diet ginger ale and the chips for a handful of nuts. “I lost forty pounds in forty weeks,” he said. “I went from 210 to 170, and I’ve been 170 pounds ever since.”
By happenstance, Ruff was in the midst of reforming his personal eating habits when Kraft put him in charge of the company’s own anti-obesity effort, and this couldn’t have been a better fit. Ruff, as a worried consumer, was already walking around the grocery store muttering to himself, “I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that.” Now, as a Kraft executive, he could walk around the same store saying, “We shouldn’t sell this, we shouldn’t sell that.”
Joining Ruff on the obesity team was Kathleen Spear, the Kraft attorney and senior vice president who sought to distinguish products that were merely alluring from those that compelled overeating. Another member was the company’s senior vice president for external affairs, Michael Mudd. It was Mudd who, back in 1999, had stood before the chief executives of the largest food companies in America and tried to enlist them in the war on obesity. When, instead, he got a scolding from these men, he had regrouped and was now making a new, more improbable proposition: that Kraft go it alone. Thus, it was Mudd who organized the panel of outside experts to advise Kraft on obesity in 2003, and it was Mudd who convinced Ellen Wartella, the kids marketing expert, to join the panel.
That fall, as the panel met, the three Kraft executives — Ruff, Spear, and Mudd — lost little time in advancing their agenda. No longer a mere cabal of company insiders conspiring on their own, their mission had been officially sanctioned by Kraft. They now had permission to roam through the company’s entire operations, with an eye toward challenging any practice or policy that contributed to the obesity epidemic. When Wartella presented her damning evidence of Kraft’s aggressive marketing to kids, the three executives championed that as their first reform. They urged Kraft to put the brakes on its advertising, which it did. No longer would Kraft pitch products to kids that lacked nutritional value. Now, these products had to have substantial amounts of whole-grain fiber, fruits or vegetables, and key vitamins and minerals.
The anti-obesity team turned next to Kraft’s labeling, with the intention of making it honest. Their primary concern was the fine print known as the “nutrition facts,” which the FDA had required starting in the 1990s. This information is usually listed on the back or side of the package, framed by a thin black line, and while it doesn’t say “Warning,” that is precisely how the obesity team came to view these disclosures: warnings to consumers about the ingredient loads inside. The nutrition facts tell you how many calories are inside, as well as how much salt, sugar, and fat.
As the obesity group saw it, the problem for consumers was the way the FDA let Kraft and other companies do the math. All this critical information was couched in terms of a single serving. Instead of telling consumers how much the whole package contained, the nutrition facts said only how much there was in a serving. This gave the manufacturers an obvious advantage: It shrank all the numbers and downplayed the nutritional risk. Take a bag of potato chips. Instead of saying 2,400 calories and 22.5 grams of fat, which were the true contents, the nutrition facts said 160 calories and 1.5 grams of fat, which were the contents per serving. Moreover, these things called serving sizes had been established by the FDA in the early 1990s, based on surveys from the 1970s, and had little to do with the way people really ate, especially when it came to junk food that compelled overeating.
This matter of serving size was made all the more deceptive by the super-sizing trend, which swept first through the fast food chains and then grocery stores, packing more and more food and soda in each container so people would buy more and consume more. Kraft’s own boxes and bags of snack food were among the offenders. Many of its packages contained two or more of what the government defined as a reasonable serving, and there was nothing inherently wrong with that, the obesity team argued. But the formulas for these foods were engineered so perfectly to create bliss that almost no one stopped at just one serving. Kraft knew this from its own research. A 2003 survey of nearly 1,600 adults found that nearly a third acknowledged that they practiced John Ruff’s own pre-diet mode of snacking: When opening a bag containing multiple servings, they would eat the whole thing.
The obesity team toyed with the idea of splashing the biggest warning — how many calories the whole package contained — right on the front of the label, to better alert consumers. But when the Nabisco managers complained that this would put them at a huge disadvantage in the cookie aisle, where no other company would be doing the same thing, Kraft settled on putting this number — along with the calculations for salt, sugar, and fat in the whole box or bag — in the nutrition facts. It added a second column of figures next to the single-serving set, to spell out the whole package’s contents.
Kraft couldn’t make this change without the FDA’s permission, so in May 2004, company officials met with the agency to explain the idea and their reasoning for having a dual listing. The company showed the FDA photographs of its own products to illustrate what Kraft now considered to be a deceptive practice. Among these was a ninety-nine-cent bag of Mini Chips Ahoy! cookies, which weighed only 3 ounces but contained three servings, with all the critical nutrition information shrunk accordingly. One impetus to overeat was readily apparent right on the package: In big, brightly colored lettering, the marketing people at Kraft had blazoned “Indulge.”
Some consumers could restrain themselves when they opened a bag like this, sharing the cookies or saving some for later, Kraft told the FDA, citing its polling. But many people could not. “These products can reasonably be consumed as a single serving,” Kraft told the FDA. “What is the best approach to labeling products showing 2–4 servings? ‘Do the math’ for consumers.”
The honest labeling move by Kraft would have a powerful ripple effect. Within months of the 2003 meeting, the FDA was urging the entire industry to consider adopting Kraft’s whole-content listing for foods with multiple-serving foods that were conducive to overeating, and by 2012, the food industry was discussing even more changes. These included the reform that Kraft wanted to make but could not do without risking big losses in sales: putting a total calorie count on the front of food packages.
John Ruff had been forthright with me in discussing the team’s work. We met twice, and we also spoke on the phone, and he walked me through Kraft’s initial steps, noting the company’s willingness to restrain itself in marketing to kids and to be honest about the portion size deception. So I asked him about the bigger, much thornier problem with processed foods and obesity: the huge loads of salt, sugar, and fat that so many products bear.
I asked him if anybody asked the question, “ ‘What if some of these products are so tasty, people can’t resist eating them?’ Is it possibly part of the problem that you have just made this stuff taste so good that people can’t help but eat too much?”
“That was in constant discussion, and came up in many different forums,” Ruff replied. It was, he said, the toughest issue of all for the team to wrestle with. No one at Kraft, in his experience, had ever talked about formulating the company’s foods to be “addictive,” he said. But then, they didn’t have to use that particular word. It was a well-known and accepted fact that the entire company — from the food technicians to the package designers to the advertising copywriters — were pulling together to achieve one goal and one goal only. “You’re looking for the product tha t people like best,” Ruff told me. “We would talk about people ‘desiring’ foods, and at the end of the day, you make the best-tasting food you possibly can.”
Thus, it was with considerable nerve that Kraft in 2004 broached the topic of its product formulations.
Since its beginnings more than a century ago, the processed food industry has viewed these formulations as a matter of inviolable corporate rights. The company chiefs, and the chiefs alone, could determine how much salt, sugar, and fat to put into their products, and if they deferred to anyone, it was their food scientists, who handled the specifics on bliss. But now, rethinking their culpability in the obesity crisis and wanting to do the right thing by consumers, Ruff and his colleagues pressed Kraft to act. The initiative they proposed in late 2003 was nothing short of heretical: In developing new products, Kraft’s food scientists and brand managers could no longer add all the salt, sugar, and fat they wanted. Kraft, in fact, set caps on each of these ingredients, along with calories, across every category of food it produced. The idea was to start shrinking the salt, sugar, fat, and calorie loads of its entire $35 billion portfolio.
Today, Kraft insists it remains committed to these caps. To get a closer look at this, I visited the company in 2011, toured its research and development laboratories, and sat down with top officials to discuss the status of the anti-obesity campaign, eight years after the launch. Among the people I talked to was Marc Firestone, the company’s general counsel, who came to Kraft from Philip Morris and returned to the tobacco company in 2012. The cabal of Kraft insiders who were pressing the company to fight obesity had considered Firestone an ally, but in our meeting he was restrained. For competitive reasons, he said he could not provide me with details on the caps Kraft placed on salt, sugar, and fat — either their actual amounts or any specifics on how the ingredient caps have held up over time.
But skeptics abound, especially among competitors who viewed Kraft’s anti-obesity initiative as a cunning maneuver — or as the vice president for communications at General Mills, Tom Forsythe, put it to me, “a bit of a stealing of a march by Kraft. I will say that was a nice PR play, but it put the company in a difficult spot. Let’s be honest, they’re a cheese company, and there’s a whole bunch of products that they were not going to make spiffy new healthy. So that was artfully written in a way that made them look good, but it had a lot of asterisks and or’s in key places.”
So I tried another approach with Firestone.
Back in 2004, I said, Kraft was saying it had managed to get something like 30 billion calories out of two hundred products. Do you know if there’s a corresponding figure now?
“In Capri Sun alone we took out 120 billion calories,” Firestone said. “But across the whole portfolio I can’t say, because I don’t think we’ve racked it up. We’ve looked at the amount of sodium we’ve taken out. Last year was six million pounds, and we’re going to add nine billion servings of whole grain between now and 2013, so those are things where we’ve got major initiatives.”
If those numbers sound impressive, consider what Michelle Obama managed to wrestle out of the entire processed food industry in 2010, after asking for their help in fighting obesity. “I am thrilled to say that they have pledged to cut a total of one trillion calories from the food they sell annually by the year 2012, and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015,” she announced. “They’ve agreed to reformulate their foods in a number of ways, including by addressing fat and sugar content, by introducing lower-calorie options, and by reducing the portion sizes of existing single-serve products.”
The math on all this, however, is less compelling. If everyone in America consumed the standard 2,000 calories a day, or 730,000 a year, the 1.5 trillion in saved calories would reduce our collective eating by not quite 1 percent. It’s actually bleaker than that, according to some health policy experts. In reality, many of us consume far more than 2,000 calories, and processed foods make up a large part, but not all, of our diets. So the real drop in consumption from those 1.5 trillion calories is likely much less than that 1 percent. Still, it’s a start.
One of the most enthused supporters of Kraft’s anti-obesity initiative was the co-CEO, Betsy Holden, in what seemed like a striking turn in her career. Holden had risen quickly in the company after joining the desserts division of General Foods in 1982. She impressed everyone by her handling of brands like Cool Whip, and later, she was credited with innovations in the DiGiorno brand that turned the company’s pizza business into a $1-billion-a-year behemoth. By late 2003, however, Kraft was slumping on numerous fronts. Some new products, like Chips Ahoy! Warm ’N Chewy, had flopped altogether. Reliable standbys, like Philadelphia Cream Cheese, were falling below expectations. That summer, a conference call with Wall Street analysts turned hostile when Kraft delivered the news that its operating income had come in below expectations and that the company would need to spend $200 million trying to regain its competitive position.
“Do you think there’s a bigger problem?” a Morgan Stanley analyst asked. “Because clearly you’re underperforming your peers.”
And what about all this talk about fighting obesity? asked an analyst from Prudential Securities. How was the company going to meet its projected sales growth of 3 percent if it was worrying about people’s waistlines? “You’ve obviously made a statement on obesity,” this analyst added. “But can you clarify the company’s efforts in achieving a volume increase? You’re going to try to grow your volume 2 to 3 percent domestically, it’s almost got to make us fat.”
Holden gamely replied that increasing the company’s profits and fighting obesity were not necessarily mutually exclusive. She evoked the industry concept of stomach share. Kraft, she said, was trying to get a larger share of what people ate, not get them eating more food per se. But Wall Street was not assuaged. Just as the anti-obesity initiative at Kraft was gathering steam, through the summer and fall of 2003, the price of Kraft’s shares started to fall, tumbling 17 percent for the year, compared with a 5 percent gain for its competitors.
Kraft’s financial slump came at the worst moment for one key player: the parent company, Philip Morris. After nearly two decades of ownership, starting with General Foods, the tobacco giant had decided to start pulling out of the food business, but it did not want to sell its millions of shares at the battered price. (The slumped stock and other considerations would lead Philip Morris to delay selling the last of its shares until 2007, when Kraft, once again, became an independent company.)
Holden’s career track at Kraft ended much faster than that. On December 18, 2003, Holden was removed from her job as CEO and put into the less prestigious position of president for global marketing. The Kraft officials I met held Holden in high regard and said that her removal stemmed in part from the awkwardness of having two CEOs, but eighteen months into the demotion, Holden left Kraft to spend more time with her kids.
Michael Mudd, the obesity initiative’s biggest champion and spearhead, would leave the company at the end of 2004 as well. The panel of experts he organized, including Ellen Wartella, had done its job well, helping him and his colleagues put the company on the road to doing the right thing by consumer health. This was a path-breaking achievement of which he was hugely proud. But Mudd felt increasingly frustrated by the rest of the industry’s refusal to follow suit, which isolated and put new pressures on Kraft — pressures that involved not thinking more about overweight kids but rather thinking more about returning to the basics of processed food. Namely, boosting the value of the company stock by selling more of the foods that people liked best.
On March 3, 2011, Kraft announced that a new era of fatty, sugary foods had come to India. The Oreo, which had never been marketed there before, was headed to the shelves of hundreds of thousands of stores throughout the subcontinent, backed by a media tour de force of TV commercials, billboard ads, and a brightly colored blue bus that roamed the country, from New Delhi to Mumbai, hailing kids to come aboard for Oreo games. The marketing had an educational theme: teaching the country’s population of 1.2 billion how to eat an Oreo properly. “The ‘Twist, Lick and Dunk’ ritual has brought fun-filled moments of bonding to countless families across the world,” the company’s president for Southeast Asia and Indo-China said in a statement.
Fast on the Oreo’s heels was Tang, which Kraft introduced to India the following month with a campaign slogan: “A refreshing drink that makes children happier and think more creatively.” Next up, in July 2012, was Toblerone, the triangular chocolate bar that Kraft made in Switzerland and now sold in 122 countries. To understand how these blockbuster items arrived on the shores of India, where a surging rate of obesity is now worrying health care officials as much as malnutrition, we must go back to a time when things were looking decidedly bleak for Kraft’s cookies in American stores.
The year was 2002, and cookie sales were falling precipitously. Kraft hired researchers to find out what was wrong, and the word it got back was just short of cataclysmic: Shoppers confided that they were avoiding the entire cookie aisle, scared to death they would lose control, load up their carts, and rush home to, well, gorge.
“There was a broad market change, for which the Oreo had become the poster child,” said Daryl Brewster, the executive who ran Kraft’s Nabisco division at the time. “The consumers who loved Oreos, who loved Chips Ahoy!, who loved all our cookies, were finding themselves afraid to go down the cookie aisle because they might buy some and eat it all. So we learned all we could about it, this buy-and-binge behavior. Sometimes what happens in snacking is people get overhungry. They open up the package and it could be Oreo’s, or it could be Lay’s potato chips. They open it up, they start eating and they don’t stop at one. They finish the bag. They have just consumed hundreds or thousands of calories, and now they’re guilty. They feel awful.”
This was no small matter for Kraft and Philip Morris. In its last food acquisition, in 2000, Philip Morris had paid $18.9 billion to acquire Nabisco, including the company’s debts, and Wall Street had applauded the move. Nabisco had $8.3 billion in annual sales from a lineup of rock solid heavy hitters, from Chips Ahoy! to Ritz Crackers to the mother of all cookies, the Oreo. Three years later, however, there was only doom and gloom.
The shopper’s fear of losing control was only part of the trouble, Brewster said. The Oreo was the subject of a lawsuit that took Kraft to task for continuing to rely on trans fats, a form of fat that was considered even more pernicious than saturated fat. (Today, trans fats have been widely reduced by the processed food industry.) Also, much of the country suddenly seemed to be on the Atkins diet, which disdained anything sweet or otherwise loaded with carbohydrates — with cookies at the top of the things to be avoided.
But all would be lost if Kraft couldn’t get people to stop hurrying past the cookie aisle, so its Nabisco division got to work, and in late 2003 it came up with a move calculated to ease the minds of consumers who felt guilty just looking at Oreos. One of Brewster’s marketing specialists had the idea: Why not create a cookie package that seemed less threatening, that promised to give the eater some self-control? This concept of empowerment became known as the 100-calorie pack.
Starting with the Oreo brand, Kraft reformulated the cookie so that a handful amounted to only 100 calories. From a technical standpoint, this took some doing. The creamy filling was so rich they couldn’t make a dent in the fat. So they ditched the filling altogether, and added some creamy filling flavors to the chocolate wafers. Sales took off like a rocket. Not only that, but people returned to the cookie aisle in droves and started buying not just more Oreos but more of everything, including the full-fat versions. “People who otherwise didn’t want to go down the aisle because they might buy Oreos also didn’t buy Wheat Thins or Triscuits, because they were afraid to go down there,” Brewster said. “All of a sudden now, they went down the aisle to get the 100-calorie pack, and were picking up some of the other products.”
But the 100-calorie packs worked a little too well for Kraft. Some of these other products from rival companies started selling so well that Kraft, to put it bluntly, started gnashing its teeth with envy and fear. The main threat came from Hershey, the chocolate company. When cookie sales slumped in 2002 and beyond, Kraft may have concluded that the solution lay in easing the guilt that consumers felt when they overindulged. But Hershey wasn’t worried about that. After all, it made most of its money in the candy aisle, where guilt-ridden consumers were par for the course. Consider its strategy with the Hershey’s Kiss, which has reached the status of a retail colossus, with 12 billion of the teardrop-shaped chocolates sold each year. Whenever their sales started to flag, the company simply introduced a new variety that was so tempting no one could resist. Thus, the basic Kiss begat the Chocolate Truffle Kiss, which begat the Special Dark Kiss, which begat the Filled with Caramel Kiss, the Butter Creme, the Candy Cane, the Chocolate Marshmallow, the Chocolate Meltaway, and so on.
With that same no-holds-barred approach to marketing, Hershey invaded the cookie aisle in 2003 with a hybrid cookie-candy called S’mores. Based on the popular campfire treat, it pumped up the bliss by combining the fat in the company’s chocolate, with sweet and salty graham cracker bits and marshmallow filling. With 6 grams of saturated fat in each cookie, it became a massive seller. “These guys came in attacking the cookie space with more indulgent products, which kind of put us in one of those interesting squeezes that big companies can find themselves in,” Brewster told me.
Nabisco was left with cookies that had less fat — and less allure. Brewster said that he tried his best to compete by reformulating his cookies in ways that boosted their appeal without increasing their fat, experimenting, for instance, with higher grades of cocoa. Ultimately, however, to boost the allure, his cookie team would have to budge on fat, putting them at odds with Kraft’s anti-obesity initiative, which had placed a cap on salt, sugar, and fat loads across every category of its food, from soft drinks to luncheon meats to cheese spreads. The cookies Brewster needed to create, in order to stay competitive with Hershey, would require an exemption.
Instead, Kraft simply created a brand-new category of cookie, dubbed the “Choco Bakery,” and set its cap on fat high enough to compete with Hershey. “Our desire was to be no worse, but ideally better than the other guys,” said Brewster, who left Kraft in 2006 to become the CEO of Krispy Kreme donuts. The cookies that emerged from Kraft’s labs were not exactly diet busters, individually. But collectively they made the company look like someone who had just come off a failed diet to binge. The Oreo line went from the 100-calorie packs to the Triple Double Oreo, the Banana Split Creme Oreo, the Oreo Fudge Sundae Creme, the Dairy Queen Blizzard Creme Oreo, the Oreo Golden Double Stuf. In 2007, Kraft went all out with the Oreo Cakester, a soft Oreo filled with chocolate or vanilla cream and bulked up to deliver an additional gram of saturated fat, four more grams of sugar, and 92 added calories.
By the 100th birthday of the Oreo in 2012, the ever-expanding lineup of Oreo cookies had become a $1-billion-a-year seller in the United States. And that number accounted for only half of their success. Kraft, that year, hauled in an additional $1 billion from selling the Oreos in other countries. Even more than the fat cap waivers, this global expansion by Kraft put the company’s anti-obesity campaign in a much darker context. At the first sign of losing market share, Kraft didn’t just loosen its rules a bit. It set out to vanquish its rivals by dominating the entire global market on cookies and candy. Kraft’s big move came in early 2010, when it paid $19.6 billion to buy Cadbury and then merged the two companies’ snacks and marketing machines.
Cadbury was a familiar brand throughout much of Asia, and Kraft used the brand to introduce the Oreo. The logic in this move was explained by the company’s new chief executive in a meeting with Wall Street analysts in 2012—the tone of which couldn’t have been more different from the drubbing they gave her predecessor, Betsy Holden, back in 2003. No one asked about obesity in this call. There was no reason to. The CEO, Irene Rosenfeld, was focused on a strategy for higher profits that the analysts could only cheer: Kraft’s snacks taking the world by storm, in what she called a “virtuous cycle of growth.”
“Since combining with Cadbury, our category growth has accelerated, fueled by chocolate,” she went on. “Take India, for example. Here, we’ve expanded our reach into remote villages by doubling the distribution of visi-coolers. These compact refrigerated displays are highly visible, and they keep our chocolate at the right temperature in the hot Indian weather. As a result, Cadbury Dairy Milk was up about 30 percent last year. Our biscuit business has also undergone an amazing transformation. Oreo, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, led the way with organic revenue up 50 percent. In fact, sales of Oreo in developing markets have increased 500 percent since 2006. That’s an amazing record for a so-called mature product — or for any product, for that matter.”
All told, Kraft’s net revenues grew 10.5 percent in 2011 to $54.4 billion, a remarkable achievement indeed.
In 2012, Kraft brought its expanding synergy with Cadbury home to the United States. It started selling a spread that combined the fat in cheese with the fat and the sugar in chocolate: cream cheese blended with milk chocolate. Called Philadelphia Indulgence, two tablespoons of this chocolate cheese delivered a quarter of a day’s maximum for saturated fat and, under the American Heart Association’s recommendations, as much as half a day’s maximum for sugar.
Behind the scenes at Kraft, the chocolate cheese put the company’s system of ingredient caps under a new strain. A spokeswoman told me that Indulgence couldn’t be categorized as cheese, which has no allowance for added sugar. So it was classified as a spread or dip, which does. Out on the market, this marrying of candy with cheese began racking up stellar reviews: “My wife saw this on a commercial this morning, got up and dressed and bought out the local grocery store,” one man wrote on Kraft’s website. “Chocolate and Cream Cheese! You better get out and buy some before Bloomberg makes it illegal to purchase without a prescription.”
“This kind of blows my mind,” said another. And a third: “When you run out of ideas, spread it on your hand and lick it off!!!!” And a fourth: “I want to put my whole face in it.”
The tubs of chocolate cream cheese reminded me of the work done by Adam Drewnowski, the Seattle epidemiologist, in measuring the effects that fat has on the brain. Because fat is so energy dense — it has twice the calories of sugar — the brain sees fat in food as the body’s best friend. The more fat there is in food, the more fuel the body can have for future use by converting the fat to body fat. Indeed, the body holds fat in such high esteem that it is slower to activate the mechanism that helps us avoid overeating. This mechanism is the signal the brain sends out to tell us we’ve had enough.
Drewnowski knew that this signal was quite operational for foods that are sweet. Even kids can take only so much sugar in their food before the taste buds cringe, but as Drewnowski discovered, the bliss point for fat, if there is one, is much higher, probably up in the stratosphere of the heaviest cream. Thus did cheese and beef become such powerhouse ingredients in processed foods. As Drewnowski also found out, however, there is something even more powerful in foods than fat alone: fat with some added sugar. Faced with this combination, the brain loses sight of the fat altogether. Fat becomes even more invisible in foods, and the brakes on overeating come right off.
This ability of food manufacturers to find synergy in the interplay of their key ingredients is not limited to fat and sugar, of course. The true magic comes when they add in the third pillar of processed foods: salt.
In 2012, two USDA economists sought to refute the perception that healthy foods were more expensive. They acknowledged that this is certainly true when foods are measured by their energy value. Calorie for calorie, broccoli is far more expensive than cookies. But noting that too many calories is, in fact, central to the obesity crisis, the economists developed an alternative calculation. They compared foods by how much they weighed, and by this metric, broccoli had a lower cost, per pound, than cereal and other packaged foods that rely on the high-calorie/lightweight pillars of processed food: sugar and fat.
I’m loath to embrace any dieting tools, but unsalted nuts are gaining some notable fans, including Harvard’s head of nutrition, Walter Willett, and Richard Mattes, an expert on dietary fat at Purdue University. Nuts, they told me — besides having lots of protein and the “good” kind of fat, unsaturated — appear to have exceptional powers in the matter known as satiety: a mere handful can make you feel full, which helps you avoid unhealthy snacks. The trick is not reaching for more, since the fat in nuts gives them lots of calories that can quickly undo their positives.
The 100-calorie concept tore quickly through the grocery store, across all categories of snacks. By 2008, there were 285 items with 100-calorie packaging, racking up huge sales. But then, in 2009, sales started to slump. One theory why is that they may be ineffective at curbing the urge to overeat. One study, in fact, found that the small packs worked least of all with people who were most susceptible to bingeing. They finish one pack and simply open another. Moreover, as sales slumped, manufacturers responded by doing something that undermined the dieting powers of the small packs even further: they began putting a variety of flavors into the same larger box or bag. Inside would be small bags of chips, for instance, in five different flavors, which only increasedthe temptation to open one bag after another.
By Michael Moss in "Salt,Sugar, Fat - How the Food Giants Hooked You", Random House, New York, 2013, excerpts chapter 11. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.