Salt Sugar Fat (29 page)

I
t had been twenty years since the sliced cream cheese debacle had subjected the cheese managers at Kraft to a scolding from the executives at Philip Morris. As the cigarette makers pointed out to the food technologists, playing with the shape of products was pointless without an equal amount of energy spent on divining the minds of consumers—that the “selling” of food counted as much as the food itself.

By 2010, however, the cheese managers at Kraft had fully internalized this message, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that they built one of their most spectacular “divination” campaigns around the same product that had defeated them before: Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

The operation they launched was called the Real Women of Philadelphia, and its stated goal was to capture some of the estimated $7.3 billion that shoppers were spending each year on fat-laden additives for cooking at home. This field was cluttered with sour creams, shredded cheeses, sauces, and canned soups as ingredients for recipes, and if Kraft wanted in, it knew it would have to do something special to stand apart.
“We couldn’t win in this category with a traditional approach,” Kraft said in an analysis of the campaign. “We needed to listen more closely and respond more generously to our customers.

“Philadelphia Cream Cheese
was happy to be America’s favorite schmear for bagels and main ingredient for cheesecakes. But growth had
flattened out, and our challenge was to find new reasons for people to buy our product. Our goal was to sell more product and shift brand perception toward cooking. We needed to encourage consumers’ use of cream cheese in their recipes and increase the frequency with which they purchased the product, a measurement that had been flat for five years.”

The idea was to identify women who cook and show them new ways to use cream cheese. Kraft, however, did not want to rely solely on traditional advertising. For all its power to influence shopping habits, large numbers of American consumers saw paid commercials for what they were: pure hype. Kraft believed it could increase the credibility of its marketing by having real people do the promoting on its behalf. Thus the slogan “Real Women,” and the concept was brilliant. This was like having a neighbor tell you over the fence about the new recipe she had tried that included cream cheese as a novel, luscious ingredient.

But Kraft didn’t want to rely on everyday women alone. It wanted someone of stature to lead them. Some companies trot out their CEO to stand up in TV commercials and lend some homespun credibility to the product, but many more realize what Kraft concluded, that it “didn’t have sufficient credibility to inspire broader use of Philly cream cheese. But a celebrity partner who oozed credibility, loved Philly, and used it a lot,
would
, especially when engaging daily with a community of ‘real’ women.”

Kraft needed Paula Deen.

Deen, whose appearances on the Food Network had turned her into a star, was perfect for the role. Her show, Paula’s Home Cooking, featured Southern-style fare that is heavy in butter, mayonnaise, and anything else with saturated fat as a main component. One of her demonstrations was fried macaroni and cheese. For this, she scooped baked macaroni and cheese from a casserole, wrapped the balls in bacon, and deep-fried them in oil. As one online reviewer who awarded the recipe five stars wrote, “It’s like eating pure cholesterol! Delicious and fun to make and eat!”

On Kraft’s behalf, Deen appeared on the daytime talk show
The View
and other television programs, joined contest winners in writing a cream
Cheese–based cookbook, and opened her vast social media network to the company’s new campaign for cream cheese. The centerpiece was a contest in which Kraft offered a $25,000 prize to each of four winners who came up with the best recipe that used cream cheese as an ingredient. And the contest was run by Deen.

Every week for four months, Deen starred in videos that aired on YouTube in which she would demonstrate the entered recipes, praise the winners, and show video snippets that contestants themselves had submitted. These videos, along with the other promotional work by Deen and a website that Kraft devoted to the campaign, produced precisely the reaction that Kraft had wanted. Home cooks deluged the company with an avalanche of recipes for using cream cheese in their cooking. It had taken Kraft’s own test kitchens a decade to devise five hundred recipes that deployed cream cheese, but the Real Women campaign put that to shame. It generated five thousand recipes in three months, which Kraft began promoting through the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google advertising.

Sales of Philadelphia Cream Cheese surged 5 percent almost overnight, the first increase the cheese had had in five years. More telling, shopper tracking data showed that while the traditional usage of the cream cheese as a spread had declined, its use as an ingredient had gone up.

The only glitch came in January 2012, when Deen revealed that she had been diagnosed with diabetes three years earlier. She made this disclosure in announcing a new deal to publicly represent Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest maker of insulin and other diabetes drugs. Much of the food world went nuts. The problem for Deen was the nature of the fat-laden cooking she’d been selling, which was viewed by critics as the surest path to diabetes.

Deen went on
The Today Show
to air her side, where she was interviewed by Al Roker, who had dealt with his own weight issues by undergoing a stomach-banding operation in 2002. When he asked if she planned to change her eating habits, Deen said she had never intended for anyone
to use her recipes day in and day out. “I’ve always encouraged moderation,” she said. “I share with you all these yummy, fattening recipes, but I tell people, ‘In moderation, in moderation.’ ”

In examining Kraft’s cream cheese campaign, along with other efforts by industry to promote the increased consumption of cheese, I phoned the chair of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, Walter Willett. He was deeply familiar with saturated fats, having spent years studying America’s consumption patterns. Still, he was taken aback by how big a player cheese had become in the American diet.
“We don’t have to eliminate cheese, that’s for sure,” he told me. “A small amount of good cheese can be compatible with a healthy diet. But consumption in the U.S. is enormous and way too high.” He worried especially about cheese being used as an additive in foods where its main function, increasing the allure, runs counter to an important nutritional strategy. It’s better, he said, to eat things that are high in fat and calories, like cheese, directly, when they can be savored, rather than tucked away in other foods where their downsides—the saturated fat and the calories—are not so readily noticed.

In 2008, a team of
Dutch researchers conducted an experiment to see whether people will eat any more or less, depending on whether they can easily see the fat in their food.
“The products we used were foods that are commonly consumed in the Netherlands, but we manipulated them in order to create a visible- or hidden-fat version,” the team leader, Mirre Viskaal-van Dongen, told me. Tomato soup was served with a vegetable-oil slick floating on top and then, in the hidden-fat condition, with the oil emulsified into the soup. Bread was served with butter spread on top of the slices, so it was visible, and, alternatively, baked into the loaves, so it was not. “We also used a small bun with a sausage inside,” he said. “I am not sure whether these are available in the U.S., but in the Netherlands they are quite common. In the visible-fat condition, the bun was made of puff pastry, which has a very fatty appearance. It is shiny, and when you hold it in your hands, you get greasy fingers. In the hidden-fat condition, the bun was made of dough that does not have the fatty appearance.”

In order to measure the effect of the visible fats more accurately, the
study used more butter and oil than the fifty-seven participants were perhaps accustomed to, so that the effect would likely be less obvious in real life. Nonetheless, the results were striking. The participants were first asked to estimate the amount of fat—and calories—in the food, and in the versions where the fat had been tucked away, they sharply underestimated the levels of both. Next, they dined on the foods, having been told to eat as much as they wanted. The visible fat group got fuller faster, while the other group, downing the hidden-fat recipes, remained hungry and kept eating. In a key—but commonly overlooked—aspect of obesity, weight gain can be caused by the slightest increases in consumption, if it continues day in and day out. A mere extra one hundred calories a day will, over time, put on the pounds. The participants in the Dutch study hit that mark exactly. When they couldn’t see the fat in their food, they ate nearly 10 percent more or about 100 extra calories.

This may be bad news for the heaviest users of fatty ingredients like cheese, when the cheese is tucked in or out of sight, when the oil shimmering atop a triple-cheese pizza hardens and disappears from view as the pie cools. The fat might well show up when they next step onto a scale. But the gains in consumption to be had from hidden fats was certainly not bad news for the food industry. More food eaten equals more food sold. And hiding the fat in processed foods would become an industry theme, one that would involve far more than just cheese.

I
n the summer of 1988, an assembly line clattered to life at Oscar Mayer in Madison, Wisconsin, just off Packers Avenue as it skirts the eastern shore of Lake Mendota. It wasn’t much of an assembly line, more cobbled together than engineered, and set up not in the vast processing plant
where 1,800 workers turned out cold cuts, ham, and hot dogs but in the company’s headquarters building, up on the seventh floor.

There, in a large open space the company’s research and development staff used to test food ideas, a crew of twenty men and women took up positions alongside the makeshift conveyor belt. At first blush, what came down the line was unremarkable: little white subdivided plastic trays, so small and light they flitted rather than bumped along.
Behind the workers were tables piled high with the product waiting to go into the trays: sliced bologna.

Bologna was a signature item for Oscar Mayer, but over the years it had been steadily losing appeal with the American public, in part because
of its hefty loads of saturated fat and salt. The company had always sold it by itself, in the deli meat section, sliced in half-pound packs. On these trays, however, the meat would play a less prominent role. It became a component, one among many, slipped into a package that didn’t suggest meat as much as it signaled fun. The trays had compartments, and the workers started off by tucking eight pieces of bologna into one of the slots. Down the line, each tray also received eight pieces of yellow cheese, eight butter crackers, and a yellow paper napkin. The trays were then sealed with plastic, wrapped in a school bus–yellow cardboard sleeve, and packed into cartons for a journey that, if all went well, would take them from warehouse to distribution center to grocery stores across America, where they would get stacked in the meat-section coolers.

Standing off to the side, the man responsible for this product, called Lunchables, watched the crew with a measure of trepidation. For two and a half years, Bob Drane had led a team of food technicians and designers on a long, difficult quest to invent these little trays. At one point, Drane’s team hid out in a hotel meeting room they
dubbed the “Food Playground,” where they gathered for days on end with bags of groceries and art supplies, snipping and taping and tasting their way to the perfect marriage of package and food. Now, as the first trays rolled off the line, Drane worried that they’d gotten it all wrong.

Drane had been Oscar Mayer’s vice president for new business strategy and development since 1985. He had been through enough launches to know that the odds of success were long.
In the great churn of processed food merchandising, 14,000 newly hatched products show up every year in the grocery store, each of which typically carries between 15,000 and 60,000 items; two of every three products will fail to last a few months. One in ten of those that do survive will achieve what the industry views as a modest success: $25 million in annual sales. All in all, inventing processed foods is a bit like drilling for oil: The big money is made through the endless pumping of mediocre wells, knowing that occasionally, a gusher will come along.

As it turned out, Drane was right to worry about the rollout of Lunchables,
but not for the reason he thought. The trays did not get yanked immediately from the stores: They flew off the shelves. The sales of Lunchables were phenomenal from the start,
hitting $217 million in the first twelve months. Grocers scrambled to make more room for them in their coolers, and Oscar Mayer’s salesmen, who at first had refused to pitch the puny 4.5-ounce trays, rushed back to Madison clamoring for more and more trays, as fast as the line workers in the factory could get them out.

Drane’s problem lay in trying to balance the books. While sales were spectacular, so were production costs, as Oscar Mayer struggled to expand its modest factory line to keep up with the deluge in orders. The trays were priced as low as $1.29, and the more they sold, the more money the company lost. The first year’s tally for Oscar Mayer?
A net loss of $20 million.

“There’s a huge, huge scramble going on,” Drane told me one afternoon in his home office in Madison. “How can we produce millions of these units at a reasonable cost? Because while we
thought
we knew how to do that, the truth is, we didn’t. Oscar is making hot dogs and bologna and stuff like that, but it has no experience with assembly operations, where you’ve got a tray and you fill up the tray and do all that kind of stuff. As we start to roll out with this thing, there is an awful cost structure, with huge amounts of waste. The red ink at the bottom line is piling up, and my bankers are sitting across from me every single day, saying, ‘What’s going on here? You’re having a lot of fun selling lots and lots of volume to consumers but we’re not making any money, and what are you going to do about it?’ ”