Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (8 page)

The Dr Pepper project was extraordinary in one other way. The company wasn’t looking for new customers as much as it was trying to get its existing customers to buy more of its product, without regard to whether it was the original flavor or the Cherry Vanilla. Thus, the Moskowitz team’s campaign was for nothing less than the hearts and minds of the most devoted Pepper fans.
They devised sixty-one different formulations, varying the sugar flavorings ever so slightly with each incarnation. They rounded up tasters across the country, and sat them down to a series of 3,904 tastings. And once all that testing was done, Moskowitz then performed his high math, searching for the one thing the food industry covets more than anything else, the defining facet of consumer craving: the bliss point.

I
met Howard Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. He is a large man in every sense of the word, tall with sandy gray hair, and the club’s cushy chairs and refined breakfast menu suit him well. Moskowitz obtained his doctoral degree from Harvard in the late 1960s, adding a PhD in experimental psychology to his earlier focus in mathematics. In choosing a subject for his thesis, his
professors gave him a choice between political polling and human taste, and for Moskowitz, the decision was easy. “I was young and thin, and had grown up in a kosher home,” he explained. “At Harvard I was eating hamburgers, fried fish, fries.” He went for the human taste. Back in the 1960s, so little was known about why people like the foods they do that Moskowitz focused on creating a scientific method by which researchers could study taste. He devised an experimental protocol in which he methodically created mixtures of sweet with salty, salty with bitter, and bitter with other flavors. He then walked around campus corralling guinea pigs, whom he paid fifty cents to taste the mixtures and tell him which ones they liked and which ones they did not.

When we first sat down, Moskowitz wanted to make it clear that, while he derived much of his income from large food companies, he was no industry sycophant. We started off talking about salt, which had become a hot-button issue for food manufacturers, who increasingly stood accused of oversalting their products to boost their allure. Manufacturers were failing to cope with the increasing health concerns about salt through no fault but their own, he told me. “They have a real fear of playing around with the products, and my own personal feeling is there is an intellectual laziness in the food industry. We talk a lot about taking salt out, but we don’t want to do our homework.” On the other hand, salt—with its long-term health issues—does not have the power of sugar in compelling the industry to act. Sugar is directly linked to body fat, and as a result, low-calorie sweeteners have opened up a huge market of people eager to look better by losing weight.
“If all of a sudden people started demanding lower salt because low salt makes them look younger, this problem would be solved overnight,” he said.

We also talked about the obesity crisis, and while he has some suggestions for how the industry could help curb obesity—applying more rigorous research to the problem, for example—he said he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on the bliss point or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said flatly. “I did the best science I could. I was
struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead of my time, and I had to take what I can get. Would I do it again? Yes, I would do it again. Did I do the right thing? If you were in my position, what would you have done?”

Moskowitz takes pride in the science he brought to food invention.
As he told a gathering of food technicians in 2010, “The history of your field wasn’t real science. There were no methods. There was no corpus of knowledge. Where did sensory research come from? It was a bunch of bench chemists asking why things taste good. And the market researcher was some hapless person trying to figure out whether the stuff would sell or not.”

His path to mastering the bliss point began in earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, sixteen miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs.
The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat
more
rations, not less, when they are out in the field, running operations.
“The problem in the military is the same as in nursing homes,” said Herb Meiselman, one of Moskowitz’s former colleagues at the Army labs. “When you go into combat, you reduce your eating, and if you do that for too long, you lose body weight.”

The soldier’s basic food in the field is the pouch of dehydrated rations known as the MRE, which stands for “Meal, Ready to Eat,” and the shelf life alone is an appetite killer. At Natick, the technicians laugh when civilian food makers complain about having to formulate their products to hold up in the grocery store for ninety days. Army rations must last for three years, in scorching heat. To address the body weight problem, the Army knew it would have to compete with the convenience foods that soldiers are accustomed to eating back home. “To get them to eat more, every year we’re coming out with seven or eight new entrees to test, looking at the trends, what’s popular in restaurants,” said Jeannette Kennedy, the project officer for Natick’s research on the MRE. “The beef patty did great at the beginning of the Iraq War but got taken out because it was not scoring well
in field tests. So for 2012, we’re doing more than simple hamburgers. It’s Asian pepper steak and Mexican-style chicken stew.”

Natick was just starting to experiment with the MRE in 1969 when it hired Moskowitz. One thing was quite clear when it came to these packaged meals. Soldiers gradually began to find them so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this MRE fatigue was a mystery. “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” he said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”

This contradiction would come to be known as
“sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, this is the tendency for big distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by making you feel full, or satiated, really fast. Sensory-specific satiety not only helped shape the Army’s mass production of MREs; it also became a guiding principle for the processed food industry. The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!

With the appetites of soldiers flattened by war, Moskowitz began to focus his research on the one ingredient that packs more allure than anything else: sugar. This was still the early 1970s, when scientists had little understanding of how sugar created such strong magnetism in food. Exploring the science of how sugar traveled from the taste buds to the brain to create cravings would require cutting-edge medical equipment, such as the full-body scanner known as the MRI, which would not be invented until 1977. Moskowitz, however, toiling in the drab, institutional Army labs at Natick, produced some of the first primitive studies on cravings for scientific journals with titles like “Taste Intensity as a Function of Stimulus
Concentration and Solvent Viscosity.” Eventually, he hit a vein of research that, in years to come, would prove to be a rich strike for the manufacturers of processed foods.

Moskowitz initially set out to learn how to maximize the power of sugar in foods, conducting the same kind of taste tests he designed at Harvard. With the resulting data he created graphs that, he noticed, looked like an inverted U. They showed that our liking of food rose as the amount of sugar was increased, but only to a point; after that peak, adding more sugar was not only a waste, it
diminished
the allure of the food.

Moskowitz wasn’t the first scientist to notice this phenomenon, but he takes credit for being the first to recognize its financial potential—an epiphany that came one afternoon in 1972, as a colleague looked over his work.
This colleague, Joseph Balintfy, was a University of Massachusetts professor who was pioneering the use of computer modeling to create complex menus for hospitals and other institutions where large numbers of people had widely divergent nutritional needs and tastes. The Army labs had retained him to work on its menus. Balintfy was examining Moskowitz’s graphs on sugar’s allure one day when he pointed to the top of the upside-down U and said, “That’s your bliss point.”

“And I said, ‘That’s a great name,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “It’s just so sexy. What are you going to call it, the ‘optimum sensory liking’?”

I
t wasn’t until the early 1980s that Moskowitz became a full-fledged industry star. By that time, he had married, and struggling to raise a family on his Army salary, he moved to White Plains, about twenty-five miles north of New York City. White Plains had become a magnet for some of the largest processed food manufacturers in the country, and shortly after arriving, Moskowitz started his own consulting business. The food giants were facing some of the toughest years in their history, transitioning from an era of smugness—in which almost everything they invented, from Hamburger
Helper to Pringles, was a surefire hit—to getting called on the carpet regularly for lackluster sales by their ultimate master: Wall Street.

The largest manufacturer of all, General Foods, had come to be seen as a plodding dinosaur that feared innovation and relied too heavily on old products, including coffee—which, at $2.5 billion, accounted for more than a quarter of its annual sales—and frozen vegetables.
The company, plagued by bureaucracy, was notorious for moving slowly in response to marketplace trends. The thousand people who worked at its vast research and development operations on the banks of the Hudson River were churning out precious few hits. One financial analyst dubbed it
“one of the great ho-hummers among giant food companies.” In 1985, General Foods got a new lease on life when the tobacco giant Philip Morris acquired it for $5.75 billion, but that only intensified the pressure on the beleaguered food side executives. The tobacco company wasn’t being philanthropic. Philip Morris wanted a return on that investment, and fires were soon lit within General Foods to get the profits up.

Howard Moskowitz had already been working on projects for General Foods for a number of years, helping the company develop winning formulas for its cereals and Jell-O, when the company called on him in 1986 to help with a more pressing crisis.
Maxwell House, their flagship coffee brand, was losing badly to Folgers, and the coffee managers were at a loss about how to turn the tide. The problem was not marketing. It was far worse than that. A string of taste tests showed that people simply liked Folgers better. Pressed by their new bosses at Philip Morris, the General Food executives knew there was only one way out: They needed a new formula. Whatever beans and roasting process the company was using, it wasn’t working. They needed to start over.

Instead of making a few different roasts and submitting them to a new panel of tasters, Moskowitz pored over the data from the tests that had been done. In these, and in subsequent tests, he made a key observation. The data showed that people had varied preferences for coffee that could be grouped into three different roasts, weak, medium, and strong. Each
roast was considered equally perfect by their respective fans. This was a novel concept at the time. The American consumer was viewed as a singular target, uncomplicated by variation, and every food company making every grocery product was focused on finding the one perfect formulation. Moskowitz, in a bold stroke, convinced General Foods that it should be selling not one but all three of these roasts—a breakthrough that the executive in charge of fixing Maxwell House at the time, John Ruff, told me saved the brand. “We actually reversed a loss to a win against Folgers,” he said.

If coffee had not one but three states of perfection, Moskowitz asked, what about the rest of the grocery store? Couldn’t the same principle apply there? He wasn’t envisioning the line extensions that companies later adopted to boost sales, using slight variations in color or taste or packaging to bring new consumer excitement to the main product; he imagined reworking the main products themselves, with the idea that consumers could be sorted into groups with distinct preferences. With that insight, Moskowitz’s shop turned into the industry’s miracle maker as food companies ditched their own in-house food technicians to retain his advice. Vlasic, the pickle maker, hired Moskowitz and came away with the finding that pickle lovers fell into three large groups whose preference for tartness ranged from weak to strong. Campbell, the soup manufacturer, brought him aboard to revamp its Prego spaghetti sauce, which was getting trounced by Ragu.

The brilliance of his work on Prego was memorialized in a 2004 presentation by the author Malcolm Gladwell at the TED Conference in Monterey, California, in which Gladwell called Moskowitz a “personal hero”: