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Kids weren’t the only ones being targeted, however. Lunchables, in all of its incarnations, were powered by some potent psychology aimed at moms as well. In the beginning, the trays were wrapped in a cheerful, yellow cardboard sleeve that evoked the image of a gift, giving working moms who felt guilty for leaving their kids something special to give them in the
morning as they headed out the door.
“The box was there as a gift, something precious to elevate its specialness,” Drane said. A few years after the launch, the cardboard sleeve was dropped in response to environmental criticism that the Lunchable was overpackaged. “It was one of those hold your breath moments,” Drane said. But the impression of gifting was already so well established, it seemed to work just as well with a sleeveless box. “People tend to buy out of the right side of their brain, using emotions, and so we learned over time that for moms, this was a gift for their kids, and for kids it was a badge for their classmates.”

Ultimately, it was the kids themselves who would make or break the Lunchables, so Kraft honed in on this concept of self-empowerment with all the marketing power it could muster. A few years later, the CEO of Kraft, Bob Eckert, put his finger on the psychology of this phenomenon of self-empowerment.
“Lunchables aren’t about lunch,” he said in 1999. “It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.” Drane added,
“Kids like to build things and play with food.”

In response to this targeting of kids, Kraft shifted its advertising strategy. (The first campaign had targeted mothers with a theme called “The Bad Week.” These ads proffered the trays as the solution to their mad dash to get out the door in the mornings.) As the focus swung toward kids, however, Saturday morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message, one of independence and empowerment.

“All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

With this powerful marketing strategy in place and pizza Lunchables proving to be a runaway success, the entire world of fast food suddenly opened up for Kraft to pursue. Chains like Taco Bell were hooking America on the speedy, cheesy nature of “Mexican” food, so Lunchables came out with a Mexican Lunchables called Beef Taco Wraps. (Like the pizza, the taco filling was packed separately so that kids could be their own chefs at school.) Hamburgers, of course, were still the most popular fast food of all, and McDonald’s reigned supreme for kids with its Happy Meal, so Lunchables went after that too. It created the Mini Burgers Lunchables,
packing the tray with two meat patties, Kraft processed cheese, two buns, and a choice between ketchup or mustard, soft drink, and a candy bar. The Mini Hot Dog Lunchable was not far behind, which also happened to provide a synergistic way for Oscar Mayer to sell its wieners. This was followed by a line of Lunchables that extended the product’s reach beyond lunch to other times of the day, including breakfast. By 1999, pancakes—which included syrup, icing, Lifesavers candy, and Tang, for a whopping 76 grams of sugar—and waffles were part of the Lunchables franchise as well.

This entire array was meant to be eaten cold, and the kids weren’t bothered by cold pancakes any more than they were by raw pizza. Annual sales kept climbing, past $500 million, past $800 million; at last count, it was close to $1 billion. In food industry parlance, the Lunchables became more than a hit: It became a category. And it sustained Oscar Mayer at a time when its red meats were flagging.

Eventually, more than sixty varieties of Lunchables and other brands of trays—including Armour’s Lunchmakers, which included a processed ham and cheese item called Cracker Crunchers and a Nestlé Crunch bar—were showing up in the grocery stores, mostly aimed at kids. In 2007, Kraft even came out with Lunchables Jr. for three- to five-year-olds.

Not surprisingly, much of this chilled processed food has been found lacking nutritionally. Convenience, of course, does have a price. Loads of salt, sugar, and fat are used not only to boost the allure of the foods; they are needed to make them safe for eating weeks or months after they were manufactured. And by 2009, when an advocacy group took a look at the explosion of fast foods in the grocery store, the price of this convenience was no longer being measured only in surging rates of childhood obesity. Children were succumbing to diabetes in greater numbers, a trend that was marked by some shocking studies. Nearly one in four American adolescents may be on the verge of developing type 2 diabetes or already have it, compared with one in ten in the 1990s. Type 2 is the most common form of diabetes, with obesity cited as the primary cause. In 2008, doctors who used ultrasound to peer inside the bodies of seventy children, many of
them obese, found that kids as young as ten had the stiffened, thicker-walled arteries of forty-five-year-olds and other abnormalities that greatly increased their risk of heart disease.

The group, called the Cancer Project, that examined the prepackaged Lunchables-type meals, sized up nearly sixty ready-to-eat meals sold by grocery stores and found a nightmarish mix of salt, sugar, and fat in nearly all of them. Among the five rated worst by the group was a bologna and crackers kit sold by the Armour company, which delivered 9 grams of saturated fat, 39 grams of sugar, and 830 milligrams of sodium. Three of the worst-rated meals were from the Lunchables line, including, in the number one spot, a ham and cheese tray from the Maxed Out line. It had all the fat of the bologna tray, but with 57 grams of sugar—nearly 13 teaspoons—and 1,600 milligrams of sodium, which is two-thirds of the daily recommended maximum for kids.
Under pressure from attacks like this, Kraft has dropped the Maxed Out line and is lowering the salt, sugar, and fat in other Lunchables to improve their nutritional profiles.

Bob Drane had moved on to other projects before many of these Lunchables lines were developed. But looking back to the earliest days, when he secured the funding he needed from Philip Morris to ramp up production, he said that he was not surprised by their success.
“All things started to become clear,” he said. “The volume goes up. The revenue goes up. The costs come down. The margins go up. The returns turn from red ink to black ink. You get what we call a platform, which becomes what we call a growth engine, and it goes on from there for a long, long time.”

I
n the trove of records that document the rise of the Lunchables and the sweeping change it brought to lunchtime habits, one item drew my attention perhaps even more than the memos detailing the tactical pursuit of moms and kids or the nudging and gushing praise from Philip Morris executives. It was a photograph of Bob Drane’s daughter, which he had
slipped into the Lunchables presentation he showed other food developers. The picture was taken on Monica Drane’s wedding day in 1989, and she was standing outside the family’s home in Madison, a beautiful bride in a white wedding dress, holding one of the brand-new yellow trays.

I kept coming back to that photograph over the months that I spent researching the Lunchables. Something about it kept nagging at me. Was she really that much of a fan? I finally decided I had to ask her about it. “There must have been some in the fridge,” she told me. “I probably just took one out before we went to the church. My mom had joked that it was really like their fourth child, my dad invested so much time and energy on it.”

As we started to talk about the Lunchables, however, she said a far different moment in her life came to mind. It was the day a few years later, when she had moved to Boston to work in a district office of Congressman Barney Frank, and she was having lunch with a few other staffers and volunteers. “I came in with a Lunchable, feeling some measure of pride that my dad had created this cool, nifty package. And one woman there, a volunteer, was horrified. ‘Do you realize all that plastic is going into the landfill? And all those nitrates in that ham?’ ”

“I had gone to a liberal arts college in Minnesota, and I had maybe the beginnings of an interest in healthier food, but not really. I shrank to about the size of a Lilliputian, thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right. Look at this awful yellow plastic. Look at the ingredients.’ And I don’t even know if there were ingredient lists then, but I had enough awareness to think, ‘Oh wow, this really
is
pretty awful.’ ”

Monica Drane had three of her own children by the time we spoke, aged ten, fourteen, and seventeen. “I don’t think my kids have ever eaten a Lunchable,” she told me. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we eat very healthfully.”

After the Boston incident, Monica said she used to get after her dad, berating him for “how junky Lunchables are, and now that I’m older I realize how thoughtless that was. For him, it was an effort to create jobs in the Madison community. He was deeply committed to finding ways to employ
people. That drove a lot of his pursuit. He also saw it from a cultural standpoint, that there was a need for something like a Lunchable for people who didn’t have the resources that I have. And maybe the outcome wasn’t the most desirable product, but the impulse was right.”

Bob Drane didn’t strike out entirely with his kids—one of his two sons became an enthusiast, Monica said, sending his own kids off to school with the trays, but Drane said it was not unusual for product developers like him to find little in the way of inspiration in their own households. There is a class issue at work in processed foods, in which the inventors and company executives don’t generally partake in their own creations. Thus the heavy reliance on focus groups with the targeted consumer.

“People who work in these companies have very little in common, frequently, with their audience,” he said. “They’re super-educated, and their incomes are much higher, and their lifestyles are frequently very different. They’re the folks that invent things for the middle of the market, and they frequently are clueless, so the voice of the consumer is the voice you have to pay attention to, and that’s one of the principles of success. Don’t listen to the senior vice president. Let the people that you’re going to sell something to tell you what they want.”

Having done just that—delivered what people wanted, saved a few hundred jobs, and eased the morning crush of harried families—Bob Drane paused only briefly when I asked him if, looking back today, he was proud of creating the trays. “Lots of things are trade-offs, of course,” he said. “And I do believe it’s easy to rationalize anything. In the end, I wish that the nutritional profile of the thing could have been better, but I don’t view the entire project as anything but a positive contribution to people’s lives. On balance, it did a lot of things within the convenience world that served people, and the benefits outweighed, I think, the negatives. It established the model of a preprepared, prepacked lunch. And one of the things I love about innovation is for subsequent generations to go back, having a model, and continuously improve it. I’m still believing that model will long endure and will serve society, kids, and moms, in various ways, and that over time, people will adjust in the direction it needs to be adjusted.”

Today, Bob Drane is still talking to kids about what they like to eat, but his approach has changed. He volunteers with a nonprofit organization based in Madison that seeks to build better communications between school kids and their parents who are less well off financially, and right in the mix of their problems, alongside the academic struggles, is childhood obesity.
Drane has also prepared a précis on the food industry in discussing obesity with students at the University of Wisconsin. And while he does not name his Lunchables in this document, he holds the entire industry accountable for the epidemic, citing the “rise in corporate cooking, processed and preserved foods, often high in sugar/fat/salt/etc. More calories in, less calories burned, obesity up.

“What do University of Wisconsin MBA’s learn about how to succeed in marketing? Discover what consumers want to buy, and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt (scarce and high energy). So, formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more (# users x amount/user). And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’
Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

There is no magic pill to resolve the nation’s weight problem, Drane writes. Rather, he proposes a long list of partial solutions and pokes the manufacturers of processed food as hard as his daughter used to poke him. The industry, he writes, must recognize that “ ‘corporate cooking’ now plays a dominant role in our diets and ‘whatever sells’ can no longer be a stand-alone yardstick.” It must start reducing or removing ingredients that cause obesity, and “invent more products with less sugar, fat, salt, etc.” It needs to fund research “to discover how ‘corporate cooked foods’ might come closer to delivering the nutritional benefits of old fashioned scratch cooking. We need some across-the-board breakthroughs here, in ingredients, and processing/preservation systems, and shorter/faster distribution.”

In holding the industry accountable, Drane’s list of ways to fix the obesity problem had one notable gap: the federal government’s own role in tempering the processed food industry’s zeal. But there was a reason for
this. As food manufacturers know very well and as I would find out by moving the reporting for this book from Madison to Washington, when it comes to nutrition, the role the government plays is less a matter of regulation than it is promotion of some of the industry practices deemed most threatening to the health of consumers.

T
he Department of Agriculture is headquartered on the National Mall, a mere stroll from the Washington Monument. It is the only cabinet-level agency with this distinction, and in keeping with the open-door policies of its neighbors—the museums of the Smithsonian—it maintains a modest visitors center for tourists. With 117,000 employees, the agency prides itself on being of service to the country at large, a populist arm of the government. After all, when
President Abraham Lincoln created it in 1862 for a country that was still heavily agrarian, he called it “The People’s Department.”