Authors: Michael Moss
Salt Sugar Fat (54 page)
Another little-known archive of food company records is kept by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. One of its units, the National Advertising Division, provides an arbitration service for companies that allows them to settle disputes with each other out of court. These disputes typically involve challenges to the validity of advertising claims but also include cases that stem from the NAD’s own inquiries. I’m indebted to Linda Bean of the Better Business Bureau for sending me copies of dozens of cases involving Coca-Cola, Kellogg, Kraft, General Mills, among others, many of which contain details of the companies’ advertising strategies and marketing analysis—highly insightful information that is typically not made public even by the government’s consumer watchdog on issues relating to advertising, the Federal Trade Commission.
The marketing divisions of food companies release other confidential
information through yet another forum that is more public than they likely appreciate. Each year, advertising campaigns for food and other consumer goods are chosen for recognition by an organization called the Effie Awards, which was created in 1968 and was originally run by the American Marketing Association. The winners must show that they succeeded in boosting sales, so the food companies and their advertising agencies prepare case studies of their marketing campaigns that include details on the product’s financial history as well as the consumer targeting strategies they used to achieve the increased sales. I was able to obtain and review dozens of these case studies, which were posted online by the awards organization.
The food scientists who design the thousands of new products created each year have several forums through which they discuss and share the details of their work, including the Institute of Food Technologists. Founded in 1939, the IFT holds an annual meeting and food expo, and I am grateful to the organization for allowing me to attend its 2010 meeting in Chicago. More than twenty-one thousand food industry personnel turned out for this five-day event, which included nine hundred exhibitors and several hundred workshops on a wide range of topics, from adjusting food formulations in order to target the emotional needs of consumers, to controlling pathogens in food, to designing environmentally friendly packaging. Importantly, the IFT also produces a compilation of scientific papers, in abstract form, relating to the design of foods, and I am indebted to the organization for providing me with a copy of 2010 Book of Abstracts. Its 1,400 entries provided me with numerous industry contacts and leads on the most current scientific undertakings in the production of processed foods. Another scientific group, the Association for Chemoreception Sciences, produces its own annual collection of hundreds of abstracts, which I found immensely useful.
On the consumer side, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, based in Washington, has been at the forefront of major challenges to the food industry since its founding in 1971. I am grateful to the organization’s director, Michael Jacobson, as well as its senior staffers on nutrition, Bonnie
Liebman and Margo Wootan, for opening its files to me. The organization also has a deep archive of reports and studies that it makes publicly available through its website.
The shroud behind which the food industry conducts much of its business extends to the nutritional profiles of its products. Even today, there is only limited public disclosure of the ingredients they use in their products; they are required to list the ingredients on their packages in the order of their relative amounts, with largest ingredients first, but do not need to specify the actual amounts. More significantly, the product formulations are in constant flux. For nutritional information such as calories and the total amounts of sugar, fat, and sodium, I have relied on the companies’ own websites whenever possible. I have also relied on the online service Calorie Count, which is owned by
The New York Times
. It posts the nutritional information for products, as well as a grade, from A to F, based on the nutritional scores.
Finally, the enterprise of manufacturing and marketing of foods is, at its most basic level, about sales. Companies are typically loath to provide details on specific products or brands. In numerous instances, I was able to obtain sales data from SymphonyIRI, a market research group, based in Chicago, and I am grateful for their assistance.
Michael Moss, Brooklyn, New York
Prologue:
“The Company Jewels”
1
These eleven men
The 1999 meeting of food company CEOs was organized by the International Life Sciences Institute, an industry group formed in 1978 to study the safety concerns related to caffeine as a food additive. Since then, the ILSI has broadened its focus to include numerous issues of public health, nutrition, and food safety, with activities geared mainly toward the scientists and technicians at food companies. I’m grateful to Michael Shirreffs, the organization’s communications director, for information about the ILSI’s history and programs.
2
“We were very concerned”
James Behnke to author.
3
Just that year
General Mills’ share of cereal sales edged past Kellogg briefly that year and then settled into a virtual tie at about 32 percent, followed by Post at 16 percent. See, for example, the trade journal
Food and Beverage Packaging
, which on April 1, 2009, profiled General Mills as the “Packaging Innovator of the Decade.” A consulting firm, Innosight, has a revealing profile of Go-Gurt on its website. The Harvard Business School case studies include a 2008 profile of General Mills and its former CEO, Stephen Sanger.
4
twice as much sugar
The image of yogurt as a health food is even further diminished by another comparison. The leading brands, including the regular versions of Yoplait, have nearly twice the sugar of ice cream, per serving.
5
Kraft’s CEO, Bob Eckert, would tell a reporter
This quotation comes from the unpublished transcript of an interview that Eckert gave to a
Business Week
reporter in August 1999. The transcript is contained in the Philip Morris records provided to the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LT).
6
“I very much appreciate”
Michael Mudd’s presentation to the CEOs is archived in the Philip Morris records at the LT. Mudd was joined on stage by James Hill, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, where he also directs the Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center. Hill presented the health data on obesity and discussed efforts to combat the epidemic. I am grateful to Hill for his recollections of the meeting and for providing me with a copy of the slides he and Mudd presented to the CEOs.
7
Sanger had been sitting
Steve Sanger’s presence at the 1999 dinner meeting is documented by the attendance lists and seating charts kept by the ILSI, and by interviews with four attendees. Sanger, who is retired from General Mills and declined to be interviewed, said in an email that he could not recall the meeting and stressed that he had had a deep commitment to nutrition. “During my tenure as CEO, the company consistently placed a high priority on improving the nutritional properties of its product line through the addition of whole grains, fiber, and nutrients and the reduction of fat, salt, sugar, and calories. We set corporate objectives for nutritional improvement, invested in R&D to achieve them, tracked progress, and built those metrics into our management incentive systems. As a result, General Mills introduced a steady stream of new and reformulated products offering those nutritional properties including light yogurt, light cake and frosting, light soups, reduced-sugar versions
of our most popular pre-sweetened cereals, lower-fat and nonfat yogurts, reduced-salt soups, increased fiber cereals and cereal bars, whole grain cereals, and many others. We also invested heavily in advertising those nutritional improvements to consumers. Some of those products were successful; others were not. In general, consumers proved very responsive to nutritional improvements only if they did not have to sacrifice taste to get them.” Tom Forsythe, a spokesman for General Mills, said the company’s efforts to produce lower-sugar cereals that still tasted good were hit and miss, and entailed trying to market reduced-sugar versions of popular brands, until 2007, when a breakthrough in formulation allowed it to launch an across-the-board sugar-lowering effort for all of its cereals, which resulted in an average 14 percent reduction. “We used health to drive performance,” Forsythe told me. “It’s not the only strategy, and as I said, you can’t sell healthy products that don’t taste good. We have tried and we have failures to prove it.”
8
effectively ended the meeting
James Behnke said one or two other company officials spoke after Mudd’s presentation, but, “the one we all remember now is Steve. He was the most vocal. At dinner, the reaction was mixed, depending on what table you sat at. But the steam had come out.”
9
“I don’t think anything ever came”
John Cady to author. The organizers of the CEO meeting later regrouped to weigh their options, which were outlined in a memo entitled, “ILSI CEO Dinner Follow-up Planning.” They planned for Mudd to give a 30-minute “recap of the CEO presentation” to lower level company officials, “so the attendees know exactly what their CEOs were exposed to.” Discouraged by the CEO response, they decided in pressing forward to ask for less than the $15 million they originally sought from the CEOs, and to suggest only incremental efforts, starting with “items that no one would disagree are things that need to be done.” Eventually, Mudd and the other proponents of the industry-wide effort were forced to settle for a single initiative: encouraging kids to get more exercise. Several million dollars raised from
Kraft and others were used to produce educational materials that focused on physical activity as one of the solutions to obesity.
10
Publicly, there would be some overtures
For example, see the December 9, 2009, press release from General Mills announcing its sugar reduction, which is posted on the company’s website. Tom Forsythe, the company’s spokesman, told me the effort was undertaken “because of the attention to sugar.” General Mills has continued to staunchly defend the nutritional profile of its cereals, as it did at an American Heart Association conference on sugar, held in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 2010. In a presentation, the company argued that cereal contributes far less sugar than other food items, such as drinks and desserts; that cereal has the fewest calories among popular breakfasts, including bagels with cream cheese, or bacon and eggs; and that Cheerios, with 1 gram of sugar per serving, compares well with Lucky Charms, at 11 grams, in providing whole grains and other nutrients. “From a calorie and nutrient standpoint, both are a good breakfast choice,” the company said.
A number of other companies, including Nestlé, are in the process of reducing the levels of salt, sugar, and fat in their products, and in 2010 a group of food retailers and manufacturers called the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation pledged to trim 1.5 trillion calories from food products by 2015. See
chapter 11
for more on this pledge and Kraft’s anti-obesity initiatives.
11
“put us in one of those”
Daryl Brewster to author.
12
Children had become especially vulnerable
For data on obesity rates and other food-related health issues, I have relied on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. See, for example, Cynthia Ogden et al., CDC, “Prevalence of Obesity among Children and Adolescents: United States, Trends 1963–1965 Through 2007–2008,” and U.S. Public Health Service, “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity 2001.”
13
outbreak of salmonella
Michael Moss, “Peanut Case Shows Holes in Food Safety Net,”
The New York Times
, February 9, 2009.
14
Food manufacturers like Kellogg
Since the salmonella tragedy, Kellogg has made changes to keep better track of the state of its staggering number of suppliers. “In the wake of this unfortunate situation, we took several immediate steps, including establishing new cross-functional Kellogg audit teams to audit suppliers of high-risk ingredients,” Kellogg spokeswoman Kris Charles told me. “Our food safety systems include internal teams that audit our suppliers of microbiologically sensitive, high-risk ingredients, such as nuts and seeds, dried fruits and vegetables, and dairy products. These auditors visit each sensitive-ingredient supplier globally to ensure they are maintaining our high standards. Recently, we have been expanding these internal audit teams with a goal of evaluating all ingredient suppliers. More than 900 ingredient supplier locations (representing more than 50 percent of total supplier locations) around the world were audited in 2011.”
15
relied on a private inspector
Michael Moss, “Food Safety Problems Elude Private Inspectors,”
The New York Times
, March 6, 2009.
16
shipment of hamburger
Michael Moss, “The Burger That Shattered Her Life,”
The New York Times
, October 4, 2009.
17
until it was mixed together
Cargill said it has a number of alternative safeguards in place to reduce the risk of pathogens, including the imposition of testing procedures on its meat suppliers. Cargill also tests samples of its finished hamburger for pathogens and reports any positive findings “to all the potentially implicated suppliers.”
18
“The tobacco wars are coming”
Philip Morris records, LT.
19
The industry’s dependence
Author visits to the research laboratories of Kellogg and other companies.
20
“We are doubling down”
Jeffrey Dunn to author.
