Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (39 page)

The more Bible talked, however, the more his message began to resonate. Ruff recalled one moment in 2001 when Bible explained in some detail the company’s change of heart on tobacco.
“He talked about why Philip Morris had gone through this mental mind check,” Ruff told me.
“And he said, ‘For many years we had had this “not our fault” point of view. But what we started to see is that more and more consumers were feeling like we were partly to blame, and we needed to do something about that.’ ”

That a company’s own loyal customers would suddenly turn against it was a nightmarish concept that riveted the Kraft officials. Then Bible, having described the price being paid by tobacco for ignoring the public sentiment for so many years, cut to the chase. The same day of public reckoning was now likely to befall processed food, he said. The only difference was the nature of the public health concern. For cigarettes it had been cancer. “My prediction,”
Bible told his food executives, “is it’s going to happen in the food industry around obesity.’ ”

I
n 2003, six years before he retired from Kraft as a senior vice president, John Ruff paid a visit to his orthopedist to see about the pain he’d been having while he exercised. The cartilage in his knee, the doctor told him after his MRI exam, was nearly gone. Daily workouts had long been his strategy to avoid getting fat, and even at that he was failing. He had run at least three miles a day for twenty years to “offset the excesses in diet and travel, and I was still overweight,” he told me. Now, on his doctor’s advice, he could only walk and bike, which would burn fewer calories. “I had to do something about my intake, and that’s when I started to change all my eating habits,” he said.

His new diet called for avoiding his own company’s products in the grocery store.

Ruff knew about the emerging research in nutrition that found that the body’s weight control systems were much less adept at handling liquid calories than solid food, so he stopped drinking anything with added sugar. He also dropped high-fat, high-calorie snacks.
“I used to come home from work and get one of those giant bags of potato chips,” he said. “The little bags are two servings, so god knows what the giant one is. There’s probably 800 calories in there, and twice the amount of fat you need. Along with a
martini, I would consume half that bag. On a good day I could eat the whole damn thing.” Instead, Ruff swapped the martinis for diet ginger ale and the chips for a handful of nuts. “I lost forty pounds in forty weeks,” he said. “I went from 210 to 170, and I’ve been 170 pounds ever since.”
^†

By happenstance, Ruff was in the midst of reforming his personal eating habits when Kraft put him in charge of the company’s own anti-obesity effort, and this couldn’t have been a better fit. Ruff, as a worried consumer, was already walking around the grocery store muttering to himself, “I can’t eat this, I can’t eat that.” Now, as a Kraft executive, he could walk around the same store saying, “We shouldn’t sell this, we shouldn’t sell that.”

Joining Ruff on the obesity team was Kathleen Spear, the Kraft attorney and senior vice president who sought to distinguish products that were merely alluring from those that compelled overeating. Another member was the company’s senior vice president for external affairs, Michael Mudd. It was Mudd who, back in 1999, had stood before the chief executives of the largest food companies in America and tried to enlist them in the war on obesity. When, instead, he got a scolding from these men, he had regrouped and was now making a new, more improbable proposition: that Kraft go it alone. Thus, it was Mudd who organized the panel of outside experts to advise Kraft on obesity in 2003, and it was Mudd who convinced Ellen Wartella, the kids marketing expert, to join the panel.

That fall, as the panel met, the three Kraft executives—Ruff, Spear, and Mudd—lost little time in advancing their agenda. No longer a mere cabal of company insiders conspiring on their own, their mission had been officially sanctioned by Kraft. They now had permission to roam through the company’s entire operations, with an eye toward challenging any practice or policy that contributed to the obesity epidemic. When Wartella presented her damning evidence of Kraft’s aggressive marketing to kids,
the three executives championed that as their first reform. They urged Kraft to put the brakes on its advertising, which it did. No longer would Kraft pitch products to kids that lacked nutritional value. Now, these products had to have substantial amounts of whole-grain fiber, fruits or vegetables, and key vitamins and minerals.

The anti-obesity team turned next to Kraft’s labeling, with the intention of making it honest. Their primary concern was the fine print known as the “nutrition facts,” which the FDA had required starting in the 1990s. This information is usually listed on the back or side of the package, framed by a thin black line, and while it doesn’t say “Warning,” that is precisely how the obesity team came to view these disclosures: warnings to consumers about the ingredient loads inside. The nutrition facts tell you how many calories are inside, as well as how much salt, sugar, and fat.

As the obesity group saw it, the problem for consumers was the way the FDA let Kraft and other companies do the math. All this critical information was couched in terms of a single serving. Instead of telling consumers how much the whole package contained, the nutrition facts said only how much there was in a serving. This gave the manufacturers an obvious advantage: It shrank all the numbers and downplayed the nutritional risk. Take a bag of potato chips. Instead of saying 2,400 calories and 22.5 grams of fat, which were the true contents, the nutrition facts said 160 calories and 1.5 grams of fat, which were the contents
per serving
. Moreover, these things called serving sizes had been established by the FDA in the early 1990s, based on surveys from the 1970s, and had little to do with the way people really ate, especially when it came to junk food that compelled overeating.

This matter of serving size was made all the more deceptive by the super-sizing trend, which swept first through the fast food chains and then grocery stores, packing more and more food and soda in each container so people would buy more and consume more. Kraft’s own boxes and bags of snack food were among the offenders. Many of its packages contained two or more of what the government defined as a reasonable serving, and there was nothing inherently wrong with that, the obesity team argued. But the
formulas for these foods were engineered so perfectly to create bliss that almost no one stopped at just one serving. Kraft knew this
from its own research. A 2003 survey of nearly 1,600 adults found that nearly a third acknowledged that they practiced John Ruff’s own pre-diet mode of snacking: When opening a bag containing multiple servings, they would eat the whole thing.

The obesity team toyed with the idea of splashing the biggest warning—how many calories
the whole package
contained—right on the front of the label, to better alert consumers. But when the Nabisco managers complained that this would put them at a huge disadvantage in the cookie aisle, where no other company would be doing the same thing, Kraft settled on putting this number—along with the calculations for salt, sugar, and fat in the whole box or bag—in the nutrition facts. It added a second column of figures next to the single-serving set, to spell out the whole package’s contents.

Kraft couldn’t make this change without the FDA’s permission, so in May 2004, company
officials met with the agency to explain the idea and their reasoning for having a dual listing. The company showed the FDA photographs of its own products to illustrate what Kraft now considered to be a deceptive practice. Among these was a ninety-nine-cent bag of Mini Chips Ahoy! cookies, which weighed only 3 ounces but contained three servings, with all the critical nutrition information shrunk accordingly. One impetus to overeat was readily apparent right on the package: In big, brightly colored lettering, the marketing people at Kraft had blazoned “Indulge.”

Some consumers could restrain themselves when they opened a bag like this, sharing the cookies or saving some for later, Kraft told the FDA, citing its polling. But many people could not. “These products can reasonably be consumed as a single serving,” Kraft told the FDA. “What is the best approach to labeling products showing 2–4 servings? ‘Do the math’ for consumers.”

The honest labeling move by Kraft would have a powerful ripple effect. Within months of the 2003 meeting, the FDA was urging the entire
industry to consider adopting Kraft’s whole-content listing for foods with multiple-serving foods that were conducive to overeating, and by 2012,
the food industry was discussing even more changes. These included the reform that Kraft wanted to make but could not do without risking big losses in sales: putting a total calorie count on the
front
of food packages.

J
ohn Ruff had been forthright with me in discussing the team’s work. We met twice, and we also spoke on the phone, and he walked me through Kraft’s initial steps, noting the company’s willingness to restrain itself in marketing to kids and to be honest about the portion size deception. So I asked him about the bigger, much thornier problem with processed foods and obesity: the huge loads of salt, sugar, and fat that so many products bear.

I asked him if anybody asked the question, “ ‘What if some of these products are so tasty, people can’t resist eating them?’ Is it possibly part of the problem that you have just made this stuff taste so good that people can’t help but eat too much?”

“That was in constant discussion, and came up in many different forums,” Ruff replied. It was, he said, the toughest issue of all for the team to wrestle with. No one at Kraft, in his experience, had ever talked about formulating the company’s foods to be “addictive,” he said. But then, they didn’t have to use that particular word. It was a well-known and accepted fact that the entire company—from the food technicians to the package designers to the advertising copywriters—were pulling together to achieve one goal and one goal only. “You’re looking for the product that people like best,” Ruff told me. “We would talk about people ‘desiring’ foods, and at the end of the day, you make the best-tasting food you possibly can.”

Thus, it was with considerable nerve that Kraft in 2004 broached the topic of its product formulations.

Since its beginnings more than a century ago, the processed food industry
has viewed these formulations as a matter of inviolable corporate rights. The company chiefs, and the chiefs alone, could determine how much salt, sugar, and fat to put into their products, and if they deferred to anyone, it was their food scientists, who handled the specifics on bliss. But now, rethinking their culpability in the obesity crisis and wanting to do the right thing by consumers, Ruff and his colleagues pressed Kraft to act. The initiative they proposed in late 2003 was nothing short of heretical: In developing new products, Kraft’s food scientists and brand managers could no longer add all the salt, sugar, and fat they wanted. Kraft, in fact, set caps on each of these ingredients, along with calories, across every category of food it produced. The idea was to start shrinking the salt, sugar, fat, and calorie loads of its entire $35 billion portfolio.

Today, Kraft insists it remains committed to these caps. To get a closer look at this, I visited the company in 2011, toured its research and development laboratories, and sat down with top officials to discuss the status of the anti-obesity campaign, eight years after the launch. Among the people I talked to was Marc Firestone, the company’s general counsel, who came to Kraft from Philip Morris and returned to the tobacco company in 2012. The cabal of Kraft insiders who were pressing the company to fight obesity had considered Firestone an ally, but in our meeting he was restrained. For competitive reasons, he said he could not provide me with details on the caps Kraft placed on salt, sugar, and fat—either their actual amounts or any specifics on how the ingredient caps have held up over time.

But skeptics abound, especially among competitors who viewed Kraft’s anti-obesity initiative as a cunning maneuver—or as the vice president for communications at General Mills, Tom Forsythe, put it to me, “a bit of a stealing of a march by Kraft. I will say that was a nice PR play, but it put the company in a difficult spot. Let’s be honest, they’re a cheese company, and there’s a whole bunch of products that they were not going to make spiffy new healthy. So that was artfully written in a way that made them look good, but it had a lot of asterisks and or’s in key places.”

So I tried another approach with Firestone.

Back in 2004, I said, Kraft was saying it had managed to get something like 30 billion calories out of two hundred products. Do you know if there’s a corresponding figure now?

“In Capri Sun alone we took out 120 billion calories,” Firestone said. “But across the whole portfolio I can’t say, because I don’t think we’ve racked it up. We’ve looked at the amount of sodium we’ve taken out. Last year was six million pounds, and we’re going to add nine billion servings of whole grain between now and 2013, so those are things where we’ve got major initiatives.”

If those numbers sound impressive, consider what Michelle Obama
managed to wrestle out of the entire processed food industry in 2010, after asking for their help in fighting obesity. “I am thrilled to say that they have pledged to cut a total of one trillion calories from the food they sell annually by the year 2012, and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015,” she announced. “They’ve agreed to reformulate their foods in a number of ways, including by addressing fat and sugar content, by introducing lower-calorie options, and by reducing the portion sizes of existing single-serve products.”

The math on all this, however, is less compelling. If everyone in America consumed the standard 2,000 calories a day, or 730,000 a year, the 1.5 trillion in saved calories would reduce our collective eating by not quite 1 percent. It’s actually bleaker than that, according to some health policy experts. In reality, many of us consume far more than 2,000 calories, and processed foods make up a large part, but not all, of our diets. So the real drop in consumption from those 1.5 trillion calories is likely much less than that 1 percent. Still, it’s a start.