Salt Sugar Fat (46 page)

One look at the guidelines, however, made it clear why few manufacturers had signed on to the voluntary program. Breads and rolls being sold in New York and the rest of the country were averaging 139 milligrams of sodium in every ounce, and Bloomberg wanted to get them down to 103 milligrams an ounce. He wanted dry soup to drop from 234 to 163 milligrams, processed cheese to plunge from 398 to 297 milligrams, potato chips to go from 203 to 123 milligrams.

Bloomberg couched his voluntary program as the lesser of two evils: “If you want federal regulation, a good way to get it is to not do something.” But in the end, the few manufacturers who did agree to make pledges
volunteered only their easiest foods—those that were already so salty that a small drop in salt wouldn’t be noticed, and those that formed the smallest part of their revenue. Kraft pledged to reduce the salt in its bacon but not in its cheese. Unilever put its butter spreads up for salt reduction, but not its dry soups or its ice cream, which can have, surprisingly, nearly 100 milligrams of salt in a half-cup serving, along with loads of sugar and fat.

“I have a question,” one of the reporters said to a representative from the Mars company who was present. “You’re doing this with rice, but really your iconic product is candy. Chocolate bars, Snickers.… I don’t see any
commitment there on the billions of dollars you market in candy.” The Mars representative’s answer was so evasive that the mayor felt obliged to come to his aid. “If you help people buy their rice,” Bloomberg told the reporter, “it may help with the next product line. Other questions?”

Among the companies that didn’t sign up was one of biggest, most celebrated American food manufacturers, the Campbell Soup Company, which had declined to enlist any of its products in the mayor’s initiative.
^‡
So I traveled to the company’s headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, where officials agreed to show me the challenge they faced in getting out from under their dependence on salt.

T
his was not their first run-in with salt. The company’s habit, in fact, had given it some trouble over the years. When Campbell, in the late 1980s, sought to promote a new line of lower-fat soups as wholesome, the Federal Trade Commission intervened, accusing it of deceptive advertising, since the soups still had hefty amounts of salt. (The company settled the case by agreeing to disclose the sodium levels in its ads.) Similarly, in 2010, when Campbell began promoting its V8 Vegetable Juice as a substitute for fresh vegetables, the salt in the juice—480 milligrams of sodium in each serving cup—drew fire. The juice should not be described as healthy, a
scientific journal reviewer said in rejecting a study the company had funded in hopes of buttressing its vegetables claim. (The ads ran anyway, winning an industry award for boosting sales of the juice by 4 percent.)

In meeting with me, Campbell officials said they were laboring to take as much salt out of their products as they could without hurting sales.
Their recent achievements included lowering the sodium in V8 from 480 milligrams to 420 and taking some of its Pepperidge Farm bread from 360 milligrams per serving all the way down to 65. This success, they said, was
due in large part to a special salt the company had acquired that has 50 percent less sodium than ordinary salt. Campbell declined to provide any details on this salt, citing competitive interests. Nonetheless, the officials stressed that, in their view, there was nothing like salt for making the company’s foods attractive to consumers and that, much like the rest of the food industry, they were reaching a limit on salt reduction.

To help me see why, Campbell arranged a tasting of two of its stalwart soups: tomato and vegetable beef. My guide was George Dowdie, senior vice president for global research and development. He had worked nearly a decade for Frito-Lay and another ten years for Seagram’s before joining Campbell in 2002; this experience gave him a deep and varied appreciation for flavorings and taste.
“The reality is, we have to earn the consumer’s trust every day,” Dowdie said. “And if you disappoint the consumer, in terms of that experience and that enjoyment, there is no guarantee that they will come back.”

We stepped into a room adjoining the company’s test kitchens, where the staff brought out a stack of white porcelain bowls and several pots of hot soup.
“The question has been, really, why is it so difficult to lower salt?” Dowdie said. “At the end of the day, it’s a very, very difficult challenge. If you think about the fundamental tastes, we have savory, which some folks call umami. We have bitter, we have sweet, we have sour, but the most difficult of all these tastes really is the salty taste. It has the least understood mechanisms, and there is no substitute for it. Salt has powerful roles in recipes. Think about at home. Just a pinch of salt will explode the flavor. In our world, the role of salt is to really enhance other flavors and other tastes within the soup or the broth or whatever you are cooking.”

That may be, but in our tasting it became clear that salt played significant roles beyond enhancing. For starters, even the soups with lowered levels of salt still had hefty sodium loads. Campbell is most proud of a line called Healthy Request, which has 410 milligrams of sodium in each cup—nearly a third of a day’s maximum for Americans at highest risk, if they eat only a cup, which is half a can. But Healthy Request brings in barely 10 percent of the company’s soup sales, the company told me. The
big sellers, like chicken noodle, range as high as 790 milligrams in each cup.

Dowdie’s staff ladled out a version of their tomato soup, which they had made especially for me, doing no more than lowering the sodium from 710 milligrams to 480. Dowdie took a sip. “This is not something people could like and eat a lot of,” he said. “It’s missing something.” But then we tasted a version with the same sodium level—only this time, his staff had added some herbs and spices. Dowdie was more bullish on this one: “You taste a well-balanced tomato flavor, like something you’d make at home.”

Campbell had figured out that the way to reduce salt in soup was not the Cargill route, adding potassium chloride, but rather the trick that my mother, for one, had used to make her soups taste good: adding fresh herbs and spices.

Campbell declined to discuss what spicing it used and how much it cost, but Dowdie made it clear that there were financial constraints to the more-herbs-less-salt formula. Every time the company took the sodium down a notch, replacing it with fresh herbs, the production cost rose. Who was going to pay for this? Relative to the dirt-cheap price of salt, he said, “this is going to cost you more.”

Finally, we tasted a vegetable beef soup in which the sodium had been lowered, without any adjustment in spicing. It didn’t just taste flat. The soup had some bad tastes, tastes that hovered somewhere between bitter and metallic. These undesirables—what the industry calls “off-notes”—were likely still present in the regular soup, but the salt—in one of its functions—covers them up.

“The salt is masking these off-notes?” I asked Dowdie.

“Yeah, absolutely,” he replied. Green beans can taste bitter without salt, he said, but in this case bitterness could be coming from the WOF—the warmed-over-flavor problem caused by oxidation of the reheated meat.

A year after my visit, Campbell would encounter another stumbling block in its efforts to unhook itself from salt, one that has been perhaps even more of a burden to the food industry than WOF: Wall Street. Campbell
was having a lousy year. The revenue was flat, the forecast weak, the stock price was down 5 percent, and stock analysts were complaining mightily about the company’s financial prospects. So on July 12, 2011, Campbell’s incoming CEO, Denise Morrison, announced a plan to spur sales. She assured investors that she knew what was needed, first and foremost, to drive consumption. It was the same thing Dowdie had said about earning the consumer’s trust: no salt, no flavor; no flavor, no buy.

She said that the company would be
adding
more salt to some of its soups. Where the sodium had been lowered from 700 to 800 milligrams per serving, down to 480, the CEO said, it would now be raised back up to 650.
“Sodium reduction is important,” Morrison told the analysts. “But we have to do other things, like taste.”

The move involved only the thirty-one soups in its Select Harvest brand, but Wall Street appreciated that Campbell was now going in what it saw as the right direction. The company’s stock price closed up 1.3 percent that day. As one Standard & Poor’s analyst said,
“We look for future results to benefit from an increased emphasis on bolstering sales with tasty soup products.”

A
t a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on February 15, 1985, a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki told the remarkable story of Finland’s effort to address its salt habit. In the late 1970s, the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a result, the country had developed significant issues with high blood pressure, which in turn brought an epidemic of heart attacks and strokes—indeed,
men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not a quirk of genetics or the result of a sedentary lifestyle—it was a matter, simply put, of processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would now have to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” This, along with an ambitious public education campaign, would have
a dramatic effect: By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a
third, and this shift was accompanied by an 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.
^*

Heikki Karppanen’s presentation was met with enthusiastic applause, but one man in the crowd seemed particularly moved by the professor’s presentation that day. He had been sitting in the front row, and he rose up eagerly out of his seat to intercept Karppanen as he left the stage. Karppanen noticed him right away, struck by how much he stood out in the room full of academics. The professors dressed in a style charitably described as “frumpy classroom,” while the man walking toward him was all “slick boardroom.” He wore a suit that was expensively tailored, dark and crisp. His shoes were polished, his black hair neatly trimmed. He approached Karppanen and congratulated him on his work. He said that they shared an interest in salt, and he asked Karppanen to join him for dinner so they could delve more deeply into the subject.

Given how the man had dressed, Karppanen wasn’t surprised when a stylish car arrived at his hotel to pick him up that evening for dinner. Nor was he surprised by their destination, an elegant restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier, with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. Their conversation, however, was not at all what Karppanen was expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from quite a different vantage point: The man’s name was Robert I-San Lin, and from 1974 to 1982 he had worked for Frito-Lay. This was the $4-billion-a-year manufacturer of blockbuster brands like Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, and, of course, Fritos, the simple but lusciously fatty chips made with corn, corn oil, and salt.

Lin didn’t just work for the company. He was its chief scientist, which meant that it was his job to figure out ways to keep consumers buying these snacks. This had put him at the center of some of the industry’s most intriguing scientific inquiries, adventures really, ranging from chips all the way to soft drinks. Frito-Lay (which was, and is, owned by PepsiCo) had
engaged Lin’s expertise across the whole spectrum of salt, sugar, and fat. In their laboratories near Dallas, Texas, he had honed bliss points for all three of these keystone ingredients.

When it came to his work with salt, however, Lin found himself increasingly at odds with the company over its strategy for dealing with the simmering health concerns that stemmed from America’s overconsumption of salt. He was thrust into corporate dealings that he viewed as deeply troubling.

Karppanen had started off gently at dinner that evening by asking a few probing questions, testing Lin’s willingness to discuss the world of salt at Frito-Lay. But it didn’t take him long to see that Lin was more than willing to speak freely. In fact, he opened up like never before. Karppanen felt like a confessor of sorts, and Lin had a lot he wanted to say.

Lin was working for Frito-Lay when consumer advocates in the United States had launched their first attack on salty foods. Alarmed by the links to high blood pressure and heart disease, they asked federal regulators in 1978 to reclassify salt as a “risky” food additive, which could have subjected it to severe controls. No company took this threat more seriously than Frito-Lay, Lin explained. This was due in part to the salty nature of the company’s snacks, but also to its strong (some would say Texan) corporate culture that tolerated no meddling—in the form of regulation—from the fools up in Washington, D.C. The company’s top officials took the push against salt personally. Lin found himself caught between corporate and public interests, struggling to reconcile what was best for the company with what was best for its customers. He sketched for Karppanen the barest outlines of a battle in which the company used “experts” to take potshots at studies linking salt to high blood pressure, raised alarms about the health risks of too
little
salt in one’s diet, and financed research into finding a cure for the harmful effects of sodium, which Lin viewed as a crass attempt to divert attention from salt. Salt meant the world to Frito-Lay—as much, if not more, than any other ingredient.