Authors: Michael Moss
Clausi would come to see his tussle with General Foods over chemical additives as an invaluable lesson, one that would guide him through the next forty years of food invention. The company’s initial refusal to let him use chemicals had almost cost it dearly. No longer would he or the army of food technicians that he would soon lead at General Foods hold themselves
to some antiquated notion of what was wholesome or proper in processed foods. “I learned something there which I always remembered,” Clausi told me. “And that is, if you want innovation, tell me where you want to go, but don’t tell me how I must get there.”
On the marketing side of General Foods, however, where Charles Mortimer toiled before becoming the company’s CEO, there was something else about Clausi’s pudding that was firing these executives up, something much bigger than a few phosphates whose names they couldn’t even pronounce. In their view, the patent that hung on his wall with the prosaic title “Pudding Composition and the Process of Producing the Same” had done even more than just beat the competition. It had shown how the use of an additive could tap into, and help shape, an entirely new way of thinking about food. The advertisements they created for the pudding captured their own excitement as well as that of the public.
“Quick! Easy!” one ad said, depicting a placid and smiling mom in her sparkling kitchen as her two kids looked on. “New Busy-Day Dessert,” said another. “You can make and serve it at the very last minute!”
Still, the additive they were excited about on the marketing side of General Foods wasn’t phosphate or any other chemical. These wouldn’t turn General Foods into the biggest and richest food company in the world. Rather, it was the artful way in which the pudding—an instant hit—was making life easier for consumers who were increasingly harried by modern life.
When Mortimer emerged from the marketing side in the early 1950s to run the whole company, he would have a name for this phenomenon. He called it “convenience,” and it wasn’t just any old additive, he said in one of his speeches, this one to an industry group. “Serving the modern consumer has become a creative art, with convenience the super-additive that is changing the whole face of competitive business.”
Instant pudding had made Clausi the company’s go-to guy in a crisis, and it wasn’t long before the young problem-solver had his chance to shine. In 1952, he was pulled out of Hoboken and sent to Battle Creek, Michigan, where the company’s Post division was in dire need of help. After years of unbroken success, it found itself in a fight to the death over breakfast cereal.
And no chemical additive would help this situation. It would require something more basic: lots of plain sugar and Mortimer’s drive to create convenience.
F
rom the late 1800s through the 1940s, the cereal sold by Post—along with those of the other big national brands—had been crisped and flaked and puffed but only modestly sweetened, if at all. Cereals were sold as healthy alternatives to what much of the country was eating for breakfast: spam, bacon, and sausage. Indeed, the physician who had invented the cereal flake, John Harvey Kellogg, was quite a stickler on sweets, running his cereal company from a sanitarium where he banned sugar altogether. That all changed, quite suddenly, in 1949, when Post became the first national brand to sell a sugar-coated cereal, which allowed the manufacturer, and not the parents, to control the amount of sugar that went into the cereal bowls of children.
Post introduced a string of concoctions with names like Sugar Crisps, Krinkles, and Corn-Fetti, and kids everywhere went nuts.
Nothing in the cereal business stays exclusive for long, however, and soon Post’s competitors had joined the fray. They brought their superior marketing skills to bear and quickly propelled their own sugary inventions past Post. General Mills came up with a trio of cereals called Sugar Jets, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs and turned out an endless stream of spinoffs that quickly captured huge swaths of the cereal aisle. Then, in 1951, Kellogg jumped to the front of the pack by unleashing a marketing force of nature known as Tony the Tiger, whom kids loved for his signature roar: “Sugar Frosted Flakes are GR-R-REAT!”
Pushed back to third place, General Foods decided to change the game. It dismissed the head of its cereal unit and brought the surviving executives to company headquarters in New York for some new marching orders. If they couldn’t go head to head with Kellogg and General Mills on cereal, the executives were told, they would have to find something else to
sell for breakfast. Something just as quick and easy and just as popular with the kids.
General Foods at the time wasn’t so much a food company as it was a humongous shopping cart, which it was filling up with the biggest brands it could buy. It had started out humbly in 1895 selling a wheat cereal–based beverage called Postum, which, given the public’s nascent interest in healthier eating, was advertised as having “a small portion of New Orleans Molasses.” In 1929, the Postum company, which also sold Grape-Nuts cereal, bought a frozen-foods company whose name, General Foods, it adopted. With financial backing from Goldman Sachs, General Foods began to acquire a string of the most popular processed foods in America: Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Log Cabin Syrup, the whole retinue of Oscar Mayer processed meats, Entenmann’s baked sweets, Hellmann’s mayo, Maxwell House coffee, Birdseye frozen foods, and Minute Tapioca, the sweet pudding that gave rise to Minute Rice, the parboiled phenomenon. By 1985, when General Foods was purchased by Philip Morris, it had grown from an $18 million startup to a $9 billion industry leader. It had 56,000 employees, a research budget of $113 million, and hefty market shares in powdered soft drinks, cereals, coffee, lunch meats, hot dogs, and bacon.
General Foods was based in New York City until the early 1950s, when it moved its burgeoning portfolio from its cramped offices on Park Avenue to a fourteen-acre site in suburban White Plains, where it built an expansive, campus-like complex. Designed by the legendary architect Philip Johnson, even the parking lot was state-of-the-art, outfitted with a heated, covered walkway that said to the 1,200 employees: You are valued, and we are going places. One of the men arriving that day in 1956 from Battle Creek already had a pretty good idea he was valued. Al Clausi, now thirty-four, had become one of the youngest managers at General Foods, and he had fought valiantly to help put Post back on its feet.
By now, though, many cereal makers were not only adding sugar, they had made it their single biggest ingredient, pushing the levels past 50 percent. Post found it hard to improve on that, but Clausi gave the company an edge by tinkering with the way it looked. He invented the letter-shaped
cereal Alpha-Bits, the idea for which occurred to him after dining on pasta one evening and realizing that cereal could also be made into interesting shapes, not just flakes.
“We thought it would be attractive to kids,” Clausi said. “Alpha-Bits was being sold on the merit of the shape and the fact that it was a combination of oat and corn cereal, not as a candy.”
*
The hardest part in that venture was not optimizing the cereal’s sugar level but maneuvering around the bizarre way that cereals are made. Typically, the dough that forms the cereal is first extruded from oat flour and cornstarch and then shot by a cannon-like machine into a room-sized bin where a sudden drop in pressure causes the heated moisture in the dough to turn into steam, which cooks and puffs the dough into cereal. To retain the letter shapes as they flew across the room, however, Clausi had to formulate a combination of cooked and uncooked dough. Alpha-Bits inspired a whole slew of novel cereal shapes in the supermarket, starting with Post’s own lineup of Honeycomb, Crispy Critters, and Waffle Crisp.
Clausi was proving himself to be expert at more than just chemistry. He was a gregarious man with great people skills. His outgoing nature made him something of an anomaly in an industry where the food technicians were prone to be introverts. Clausi moved easily between the laboratories, where the food chemists crafted their formulas, and the marketing offices, where the company aggressors, the sales executives, had a prickly view of the technologists who invented the company’s products. Clausi assumed the role of mediator, especially later when consumers began placing greater demands on the industry, asking for more fiber or less fat. The marketing executives would demand instant changes from the food technologists, and Clausi would intervene and smooth things over.
“They would drive the technologists crazy,” he said. “They are instantaneous responders. When people want low fat, they immediately say to the technologists, ‘Make
all
our products with low fat!’ ”
As good as he was, Clausi didn’t yet have the grand vision for what food inventors like himself could really achieve, vis-à-vis American eating habits. This he would get from Charles Mortimer, the executive who had called Clausi and the others from Battle Creek to the meeting in New York to discuss the bruising they had taken in the cereal wars. Mortimer had never clashed with the marketing side at General Foods. He
was
the marketing side, and he ran the division until he was named CEO of the company.
As a child, Mortimer had been called “fatty.” He was a stocky kid, like Clausi born in Brooklyn, who grew up on meat and potatoes and was something of a bookworm. But as chief executive, he placed such relentlessly high demands on his employees for results that they gave him another nickname: “How-Soon Charlie”—as in, “How soon will you have that for me?” His eleven years at the helm of General Foods, from 1954 to 1965, were viewed as the company’s golden years: Sales doubled, earnings tripled, and General Foods led America to a different way of thinking about food.
“Today, consumer expectations are so high and the pace at which new products are introduced is so fast that Mrs. Homemaker usually can’t say what it is she really wants—until after some enterprising company creates it and she finds it in a retail store,” Mortimer said in a speech to business executives the year he retired. “I cannot think of a single General Foods product which we were selling when I became chief executive eleven years ago which is still on the grocery shelves and has not been changed importantly and, of course, for the better.”
Mortimer hadn’t called the Post cereal executives in from Battle Creek to chew them out. That wasn’t his style. He wanted to tell them to have courage in the face of combat with other cereal makers, and more than that, he wanted to put them back on the offensive. They could turn their position of weakness to one of strength, he told them, with only a little re-framing. If they were getting beaten by companies who were better at selling cereal, then they needed to figure out how to sell other things for breakfast. They might have to invent these things, because the homemaker couldn’t be counted upon to think them up. But the sky was their limit, he
said, and there were only a few constraints that he would place on them. These foods had to be easy to buy, store, open, prepare, and eat.
This drive for convenience had become his mantra at General Foods. His goal was to lead not only his own company into this brave new world: He felt so passionately about convenience, he wanted to engage the entire industry. In the coming years, he would share his ideas with executives from other food manufacturers and beyond, to all consumer goods. For now, however, in addressing his executives, Mortimer focused only on the company’s dwindling share of the breakfast market.
“Who says the only food should be cereal?” Mortimer said. “You are not just a breakfast cereal company, you are a breakfast foods company.”
To drive his point home, to get his employees thinking freely, he told them about the joyful scene in his own home when his own kids came trundling into the kitchen to start their day. They didn’t limit themselves to bowls of Sugar Crisps or Cocoa Puffs.
“My daughter,” he said, “likes to eat cake for breakfast.”
More than fifty years later, the words that Mortimer spoke that day still resonated with Al Clausi. As we sat in his office, he said that the cake story, along with the rest of Mortimer’s speech, was not simply inspiring. Mortimer’s exhortations gave him the means to pursue, and help, Mrs. Homemaker in a way that he had never imagined before. If she didn’t know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way.
“That was a mind spreader,” he said.
I
n his forty-year career at General Foods, Clausi dabbled in numerous aisles of the supermarket—even the pet food section, which, by Clausi’s estimation, was the easiest to transform. Until he and his colleagues put their minds to it, dog food had come in boxes and bags and was uniformly dry as a bone, utterly boring to the pooches. The problem was bacteria, which thrived in moisture. To keep the chow safe, it had to be dry. Having studied the chemical properties of sugar, however, Clausi saw another way.
He figured out that adding sugar to the chow would keep the bacteria away even in moist conditions, as sugar acted like a binder to make the water inaccessible to the bacteria. The result was a dog patty dubbed Gaines-Burgers, which could sit on the shelf until they were sold, just as long as the dry stuff could. The idea of using sugar to ward off bacteria is now embedded in the production of many processed foods, especially when the fat content is reduced.
The crowning jewel in Clausi’s career, however, had nothing to do with dog food. It showed up one day in another aisle in the supermarket, and breakfasts in America would never again be the same. Starting in 1956, he used his chemistry and people skills to transform a natural breakfast food, orange juice, into Tang, a laboratory product that was 100 percent, nothing-natural-about-it, synthetic chemical and sugar.
The Tang project had started immediately after Mortimer’s pep talk in White Plains. Before returning to Battle Creek, Clausi visited his old laboratory in Hoboken, where he took Mortimer’s advice and tried thinking big.
“Are you working on anything that people could eat or drink for breakfast?” he asked the technicians.
“We’re developing synthetic juices, like orange,” the laboratory director, Domenic DeFelice, told him. “But we’ve got a long way to go.”