Authors: Michael Moss
Another of their colleagues at Monell, Karen Teff, has found signs that sweet drinks may be a Trojan horse when it comes to making people gain weight. Our bodies might not be able to identify the calories in sweet liquids as well as they can in solid foods. Such a blindness to soda and other caloric drinks would circumvent the natural controls that the body has in place to prevent excessive weight gain. In 2006, she conducted a study in which people received an infusion of glucose, and she then watched their response. The test lasted only forty-eight hours, but the results were striking: The subjects did not cut back on their eating at all. They just took in those extra glucose calories like they were invisible. “If these liquids do not activate the nervous system, they may not be recognized,” Teff said.
More experimentation would need to be done for this notion to gain currency among nutritionists, but like Mennella, Teff is not shy about holding the food industry’s feet to the fire. When it comes to sugar in drinks or solid food, their practice is to add more first and study later—if at all.
“I’m still shocked at what goes on in this country,” she told me. “Where every single food has some sweetened component that wasn’t normally supposed to be sweetened. Honey wheat bread, honey mustard. Foods that were associated with non-sweet or that had slightly bitter components have now been made sweeter. There is absolutely no tolerance now for foods that are not sweet.”
T
he research on sugar at Monell, it should be noted, is incomplete. Some of the most critical things about it remain a mystery, such as the precise parameters of its risk in heart disease and other health problems, or whether it deceives us in liquid form, or whether its many substitutes, from saccharine
to the emerging plant-based sweetener stevia, will help us lose weight. The best guess today on the low-calorie sweeteners is that they can work only in a highly disciplined diet: Wolfing down two cupcakes after being restrained by drinking only diet sodas clearly won’t help take the weight off.
One thing, however, has become perfectly clear in recent years. The overconsumption of sugar in solid foods or drinks has increasingly been tied to the obesity epidemic, which has only grown more dire. Overeating is now a global issue. In China, for the first time, the people who weigh too much now outnumber those who weigh too little. In France, where obesity has climbed from 8.5 percent to 14.5 percent since 1997, Nestlé has been enjoying great success in selling the Jenny Craig weight-loss program to the same Parisians who once sneered at Americans’ proclivity to glom onto one diet fad after another. Mexico’s obesity rate has tripled in the past three decades, leading to worries that it now has the fattest kids in the world, with fewer resources to do anything about it: Most schools in Mexico City lack both playgrounds and water fountains. The United States, however, remains the most obese country in the world. And where the rates of obesity appear to be reaching a plateau among adults at 35 percent, they are still climbing among the group that is the most vulnerable to the food industry’s products: children. The most recent data, from 2006 to 2008, shows that obesity among kids aged six to eleven jumped from 15 to 20 percent.
And yet, for more than three decades, federal officials in Washington have exempted sugar from the recommended maximum limits that they set for the other two pillars of processed foods, salt and fat. Nor are manufacturers required to disclose how much sugar they add to their products: The amounts they cite include the sugar that occurs naturally in food. In 2009, the American Heart Association stepped in and issued a recommended limit for sugar. In a statement published in its scientific journal
Circulation
, the association declared, “High intakes of dietary sugars in the setting of a worldwide pandemic of obesity and cardiovascular disease have heightened concerns about the adverse effects of excessive consumption
of sugars.” The limits it recommended were even bolder. Noting that people were getting on average 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day, the association urged Americans to cut back. Moderately active women should get no more than 5 teaspoons of sugar—9 for sedentary, middle-aged men—in what nutritionists call “discretionary calories.” These are the treats that people who are watching their weight can have once they meet their daily nutritional needs, and the association was not messing around. For women, the 5-teaspoon daily limit would mean having barely half of a 12-ounce can of Coke, or one Twinkie, or one-and-a-half Fig Newtons, or a half-cup of Jell-O. To be clear, those are connected by
or
, not
and
. Five teaspoons don’t get you very far in the grocery store.
This time, however, food companies didn’t need Monell’s help to mount a vigorous defense. Their dependence on sugar by now ran so deep that representatives from every corner of the industry, from cookies to soda, attended a summit the AHA held in Washington in the spring of 2010 to discuss its proposal. One after another they made their case: It wasn’t just taste that made their use of sugar invaluable. Sugar was critical to the entire manufacturing process. To lessen it would jeopardize the nation’s supply of food.
The candy makers cited the bulk, texture, and crystallization that sugar gave them. The cereal makers added color, crisp, and crunch to the list of sugar’s miracles. The bread makers conceded that they rely on every known form of the stuff in their factories—corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, inverted syrup, malt, molasses, honey, and table sugar in three forms (granulated, powdered, and liquid). To drive their point home, the bakers cooked up special versions of their products using sugar substitutes, and they splashed pictures of the horrific results on the screen. The message was clear: Limit sugar, and you’re left with a sad bunch of cookies, crackers, and breads that come out shrunken, pale, flat, or distended.
“Let’s get practical,” a food engineer from Israel told the group before launching into a chemistry lesson on a browning phenomenon called the Maillard reaction. Maillard is responsible for much of the pleasing caramel coloring in processed food, from quick breads to roasted meats, and
Maillard can’t happen in many foods without a group of sugars that includes fructose.
Not to be outdone, a corn refiner’s consultant wrapped up his presentation by suggesting the AHA’s focus on sugar was misguided. If it really wanted to look at calories and the things in the American diet that made people gain weight, why pick on sugar when the bigger culprit may be fat?
“Certainly you can reformulate foods to reduce sugar and salt,” this consultant, John White, told me later. “You can replace them with noncaloric sweeteners or synthetic fats. But the character of the product always changes, and you have to accept the tradeoff.”
There would be no need for tradeoffs, however. The Heart Association’s recommendation came and went, with little action by the industry to cut back. Sugar’s value to food companies was only going up.
J
ohn Lennon couldn’t find it in England, so he had cases of it shipped from New York to fuel the
Imagine
sessions. The Beach Boys, ZZ Top, and Cher took no chances either: They all stipulated in their contract riders that it be put in their dressing rooms when they toured. Hillary Clinton asked for it, too, when she traveled as First Lady, and ever after her hotel suites were dutifully stocked.
What they all wanted, and got, was Dr Pepper. Its unique taste, neither cola nor root beer, has won it a global cult following. Its most rabid devotees proudly call themselves Peppers, belong to a club called the 10-2-4—so named for one of the early advertising campaigns, which encouraged people to drink three Dr Peppers a day, at ten, two, and four o’clock—and make pilgrimages to Waco, Texas, where a pharmacist at Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store invented the drink in 1885. This kind of devotion afforded Dr Pepper a distant but comfortable third-place spot behind Coke and Pepsi, the giants of the soda aisle until 2001, when sudden changes in
the marketing game in the soda aisle precipitated a crisis for Dr Pepper. The trouble began when a flood of spinoffs from Coca-Cola and Pepsi showed up on the shelves. Seemingly overnight, there were lemons and limes, vanillas and coffees, raspberries and oranges, whites and blues and clears—all vying for the shopper’s attention. In grocery lingo, these new flavors and colors are known as “line extensions,” and they’re not meant to replace the original product. Rather, they’re meant to bring buzz to the brand, and often they do this so well that people start eating or drinking more of the original product too.
In this case, Pepsi and Coke were using their line extensions to strengthen their hold on the soda aisle at a critical moment, just as American consumption was starting to peak. As Pepsi and Coke grew their sales with these new extensions,
Dr Pepper began to slip from the third-place perch it had enjoyed for so long. In 2002, Coca-Cola sold 93 million cases more than the previous year, for a total of 4.5 billion cases in the United States alone. Pepsi was up a little bit too, with its 3.2 billion cases. By contrast, Dr Pepper was slumping, down 15 million cases to a total of 708 million, and soda industry watchers sounded a warning. “Dr Pepper—once an industry growth brand—lost volume and share,” the trade journal
Beverage Digest
reported. The soda from Waco needed to turn things around.
Never in its 115-year history had Dr Pepper created a line extension, beyond a diet version. Given the cult following, the idea of tinkering with the soda’s unique taste seemed dubious, even dangerous. But with sales declining and the soda aisle changing, Dr Pepper had to act. In 2002, it created its first-ever spinoff, which by any measure should have been a hit. The new flavor had a rich cherry taste, a bold red color, and a name, Red Fusion, that had been carefully chosen from a field of three hundred candidates.
“If we are to re-establish Dr Pepper back to its historic growth rates, we have to add more excitement,” the company’s president, Jack Kilduff, said. Research showed that Red Fusion would even attract new customers to the brand. One particularly promising market, Kilduff pointed out, was the “rapidly growing Hispanic and African-American communities,” where Dr Pepper had “lower brand development.”
But the sales force never got a chance to explore these new markets. Red Fusion’s failure wasn’t the fault of the company’s advertising crew. Rather, it was its taste. Consumers hated it, and diehard Peppers were aghast. “Dr Pepper is my all time favorite drink, so I was curious about the Red Fusion,” a California mother of three wrote on a blog to warn other Peppers away. “It’s disgusting. Gagging. Never again.”
Stung by the rejection, the company regrouped and spent the next year developing and testing a different variation. This time, the company’s technicians couldn’t even get it past the taste testers. The hope for a new soda died before going into production.
In 2004, Dr Pepper decided to go outside the company for help. It turned to a man named Howard Moskowitz, whose success in delivering mega-sellers had turned him a food industry legend. Trained in mathematics and experimental psychology, Moskowitz runs a consulting firm in White Plains, New York, where he has established a long track record of triumphs in consumer goods, from credit cards to point-and-shoot cameras to computer games. Much of his success stems from his ability to group consumers into segments, with different emotional needs, and target them with precision.
He boosted sales for the jewelry company Shaw’s, for instance, by creating two versions of its brochure: one for people he categorized as optimists, the other for pessimists. The optimists got lines like, “I walk out of the store feeling great,” while the pessimists got reassurance: “Jewelry with a classic look.” As Moskowitz explained, “The importance here was not simply to identify these two different mindsets. Probably other methods might generate similar segments. Instead, Shaw’s was interested in what
specific messaging
would drive purchase. That is, once we know the segments, we know what to say, how to say it, and who to say it to.”
But Moskowitz’s principal focus—and success—was in the processed food industry. The jewelry market, after all, is one thing; shelf space in American supermarkets is another. The largest stores carry
as many as sixty thousand items. The competition is utterly fierce to win space from the store managers who lord over their aisles with one maxim: The most space
goes to the biggest sellers.
Supermarket real estate is so precious, in fact, that consumer scientists have conducted experiments in which they place devices on the heads of shoppers to track their eye movements as they roam the store, and the gleanings from these studies has helped define the pecking order on the shelf. Down low, by the shoppers’ feet, not surprisingly, is death. Eye level is prime, especially toward the middle stretches of the aisle. The special displays at the ends of the aisle, called “caps,” are the best of all.
The main point of generating product line extensions is to win more space on the shelf. Store managers will give only so much room to any one product, no matter how briskly it is selling. Adding new flavors and colors creates new products that get their own space, and the more likely shoppers are to see a brand, the more likely they are to buy it. In Dr Pepper’s case, its space on the shelf was being devoured by Coke and Pepsi with all their new lemons and limes and vanillas.
There is another little-known aspect to marketing groceries that reflects this intense targeting of shoppers. The seemingly static, familiar nature of these stores is an illusion. Your supermarket today will not be the same store a month from now. To stand out in the crowd and excite the shopper, manufacturers constantly vary their mainline products, usually ever so slightly, with changes that range from packaging size to color to flavor to celebrity endorsements. Howard Moskowitz, however, doesn’t fiddle with ad campaigns or packaging when it comes to his biggest food projects. He reworks the food itself, playing with the magical formulations of salt, sugar, and fat. For more than three decades, he has worked behind the scenes to stage dramatic rescues, turning losers into hits. Campbell Soup, General Foods, Kraft, and PepsiCo have all come to Moskowitz for help when their sales have flagged or a competitor has gained an edge. And his goal in each case has been to find the bliss point. Moskowitz searches for just the right amount of certain ingredients to generate the greatest appeal among consumers. Too little of this or too much of that might not ruin a product’s taste or texture, but the shortcoming will be reflected in sales, where even tiny slippages can cause food company executives
to lose their jobs. In the lingo of product developers, Moskowitz’s stock in trade is known as “optimization,” and he is not bashful in chronicling his deeds:
“I’ve optimized soups,” he told me. “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”