Salt Sugar Fat (41 page)

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.

I
n the late 1980s, a flurry of news reports and editorials focused the country’s attention on a growing menace: high blood pressure. A public health survey found that one in four Americans were afflicted by this condition, also known as hypertension, and that the numbers were climbing steadily. Doctor groups held press conferences to sound the alarm that many patients didn’t even know they had high blood pressure until they developed more evident complications, such as congenital heart failure, earning it the nickname “the silent killer.” The precise cause was elusive, but several key factors were cited, including obesity, smoking, and diabetes. The other was salt.

The problem was not salt per se. The problem was sodium, which is one of the chemical elements in salt. Further complicating matters, public health officials explained, even sodium itself was not all bad: A little bit of sodium in the diet was essential to good health. The problem was, Americans were eating so
much
salt they were getting ten times—even twenty
times—the amount of sodium the body needed. This was also far more than it could handle. In large amounts, sodium pulls fluids from the body’s tissues and into the blood, which raises the blood volume and compels the heart to pump more forcefully. The result: high blood pressure.

In looking for ways to reduce the consumption of sodium, health officials identified one obvious target: the saltshakers on everyone’s kitchen table. This certainly seemed like a logical notion. The saltshaker was not only a focal piece at dinner, passed around the table and then left there like a sentinel to guide the next meal. It had established itself as a form of Americana, something people collected and showed off. Even food companies got in the act: Coca-Cola branded a collectible saltshaker to look like a miniature can of Coke.

With all these shakers on all these tables, it was no wonder that health officials felt compelled to act. They urged Americans to trash their saltshakers, or at the least relegate them to the knick-knack shelf. In 1989, the American Heart Association began marketing an alternate way for people to season their food. It created and sold its own shaker, which contained a salt-less blend of cayenne pepper, basil, thyme, and other herbs, and it even came up with a catchy slogan to brand it as the answer to high blood pressure: “Shaking the salt habit.”

In this attack on sodium, however, no one bothered to examine, with any accuracy, the assumption that table salt was responsible for America’s massive intake of salt. The quantities people were ingesting should have been a tipoff that something else, something bigger, was afoot. Teenage boys and men under forty, especially, were pulling in
more than ten grams of salt a day, or nearly two full teaspoons. And this was merely an average. Untold numbers of people were even heavier users. Women and girls clocked in at a bit more than one teaspoon a day, but even their numbers should have made it clear that the shaker wasn’t up to this kind of salting.

So where was all this salt coming from?

The answer arrived in 1991 when the
Journal of the American College of Nutrition
published the results of a clever experiment. To identify the true source of America’s sodium problem, a pair of researchers rounded up
sixty-two adults who liked to use salt and gave them pre-measured saltshakers to use at home for a week. The bona fides of the scientists who conducted the study were impeccable: They worked for the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. This was the place where researchers perfected the calculation of the bliss point for sugar and explored the alluring properties of fat, pulling apart its molecular underpinnings to explain how the lower melting point of artery-clogging fats like butter causes them to liquefy in the mouth and produce instant joy. Monell, it was true, accepted substantial financial support from the largest food companies, including the manufacturers of iconic salty foods. The industry money, however, had not made the institute’s independent-minded researchers shy about pointing fingers at the processed food industry. They were plainspoken in chastising food manufacturers for abusing their influence on America’s eating habits, especially for the way the industry used sugar to increase the allure of its products. This, they knew from their own research, exploited the natural cravings that kids get for sweets. Now, in hunting for the source of sodium in the American diet, the Monell researchers were just as prepared to let the chips—or rather the grains—fall where they may.