Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (48 page)

Sanford Miller, who at the time was the director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told me that he and other agency officials were sincerely worried about the health effects of salt but believed that they did not have sufficient data to withstand the relentless attacks from industry lobbyists.
“The salt people, especially, were constantly badgering us,” Miller said. Another top agency official at the time, William Hubbard, told me that the agency also worried that the public wasn’t ready to make the leap on salt.
“We were trying to balance the public health need with what we understood to be the public acceptability,” he said. “Common sense tells you if you take it down too low and people don’t buy, you have not done something good.”

A disillusioned Robert Lin left Frito-Lay that year to join another side of the food industry. He went to work for companies that made nutritional supplements. Like other former food company executives I met, he also overhauled his own diet to avoid the very foods he had once worked so hard to perfect. There were few, if any, processed foods in the cupboards he opened for me. For lunch, he served plain oatmeal, with no sugar added, and raw asparagus. It was pretty stark eating for someone like me, who has been known to detour a vacation to visit a potato chip factory open to tourists. Then again, Lin, at age seventy-five, begins each day with an hour-long march up the big hill behind his house at a mean pace. By avoiding processed foods, Lin has slashed the amount of salt he consumes, which gives him mixed feelings.
“When I see salty food, I still love to taste
it,” he told me. “But I will stop at a certain point. Even though I like it, and can crave it, I’m educated. I know that my body is not designed for eating a lot of salt.”

His failure to change Frito-Lay aside, Lin’s years there were marked by a number of lasting contributions to the salty snack manufacturer. He believed in the power of intellect in problem-solving, and he established a forum where experts from outside the industry—a Shell oil president, a McKinsey & Co. research analyst, genetic engineering experts from universities in Washington and California—were invited to meet with Frito-Lay officials to discuss ways the company could be more creative in making and selling snacks. Lin sought out brilliance, wherever it might be. Among the invitees to a 1981 session was a marketing official from the tobacco company R. J. Reynolds whom Lin brought in to share what he’d learned about targeting consumers by studying every aspect of their wants and desires. This tobacco official, Greg Novak, was pioneering methods for sifting and sorting consumers by their age, gender, and race, the better to target them through specially tailored advertising, and Lin set the tone for this session by quoting an advertising executive who famously said,
“Anyone who designs a product—or an advertising appeal—based on what the people
say
they want is an utter fool.”

Five years later, with Lin long gone, this notion—that industry knew better what people wanted—would help Frito-Lay sidestep the concerns about salt, as it ushered in a new era of snacking.

T
he year was 1986, and Frito-Lay was on a rare cold streak. They’d launched a series of high-profile products, only to see them
go down in flames. There was Topples, a corn cracker with cheese topping that, true to its name, toppled right into the dumpsters behind the grocery stores. There was Stuffers, a corn shell with a variety of savory fillings, which got stuffed into those same garbage bins, as did Rumbles, a bite-sized granola bar snack that lasted barely a month on the shelves. Worried that they were
losing their touch—along with $52 million in production costs—the marketing team brought in a ringer, Dwight Riskey, a budding expert on the cravings that snacks like these were supposed to generate.

Riskey joined Frito-Lay in 1982, just as Robert Lin was leaving. He had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and part of the team that had found that people could beat the salt habit simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. In his own projects at Monell, Riskey had conducted experiments that found that a person’s fondness for certain foods was greatly influenced by whatever else they are eating or drinking at the time. Your taste for a candy bar, for instance, changes when you are also drinking a Coke. This meant that the bliss point for sweet taste was not fixed; it could go up or down, depending on what else you were consuming. This added a somewhat more complicated, real-world factor to the efforts by food technicians to create the maximum appeal for their products. “I would find when you vary things like salt and sugar in a food, there tends to be one formulation that is best,” Riskey told me. “But the truth of the matter is, I could move that peak, that bliss point. I could move it up or down, depending on what other foods or beverages I put into the frame of reference.”

Bliss points also changed as people aged. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble launching new snacks. America was aging and growing less fond of salty snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this meant that their liking for salty snacks—both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate—was tapering off every year they grew older. Demographically, this would have a profound effect on Frito-Lay’s marketing strategy. Along with the rest of the snack food industry, the company anticipated lower sales due to the aging population, and marketing plans were adjusted accordingly to lure new consumers. Advertising that had been aimed at baby boomers when they had been younger was scaled back. The thirty-five-year-old
boomer was no longer targeted with ads like he was when he was twenty.

There was only one problem with this strategy, and it was a great problem for the industry to have. Snack sales
didn’t
decline as everyone had projected. Through the early 1980s, they went
up
. It was Dwight Riskey who figured out what was going on.

Riskey kept a second office at his home, a few miles from the Frito-Lay offices in Plano, where his desk and floor were papered with the charts, graphs, and printouts of his various marketing projects. Sizing up consumers and plugging them into specific categories was a critical part of marketing, and he put long hours into his work. In looking at the rising snack sales, he was determined to find out who—demographically—was doing all this eating. One Sunday evening in or around 1989, he was at home in his office when the answer suddenly hit him: He and his marketing colleagues had been misreading the data. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups but not the habits of these groups of people
as they aged
. This was an important distinction. The latter method is known in research as a cohort study, because it follows one group of people over time, and only this method could reveal how the habits of a group like the baby boomers were changing over time.

When Riskey called up a new set of the company’s sales data and parsed it with the cohort technique, a new, far more encouraging picture emerged. The baby boomers, in fact, were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. Quite the contrary.
“In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments—the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips—was going up!” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating
more
of it. And that was what was causing the big success for all the snack food companies all those years.”

To be sure, the baby boomers couldn’t hold their own against twenty-year-olds, who wolfed down more salty snacks than the boomers could even dream of consuming. But the good news for Frito-Lay was that baby
boomers were eating more at age thirty than they had at twenty—and they weren’t alone. Everyone in the country, on average, was
eating more salty snacks than they used to. When Riskey ran the numbers, he found that the rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks such as chips and cheese crackers pushing past twelve pounds a year.

Riskey had a theory about what had caused this surge in snack eating by the boomers. Eating real meals had become a thing of the past. Baby boomers, especially, seemed to have abandoned the traditional concept of breakfast, lunch, and dinner—or, at least, they were not conducting these rituals as regularly as they once had. They began skipping breakfast when they had early morning meetings. They skipped lunch when their day was lost to those same meetings, and they needed to catch up on work. They skipped dinner when their kids stayed out late for baseball practice or grew up and moved out of the house. The boomers weren’t going hungry through all this. When they skipped these meals, they replaced them with convenient snacks—pulled from cupboards, convenience stores, or the office vending machine. “We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that the baby boomers “was not a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential. So we started working hard to realize that growth.”

To Riskey and the other marketing executives at Frito-Lay, this put the Topples and
Stuffers in a new light. They didn’t fail because aging Americans were growing less fond of snacks likes these. Nor did they fail because people were growing more leery about salt. They failed because Frito-Lay had gotten a bit lax in how hard it had marketed them, which was easy enough to fix.

T
hus began the final phase of Frito-Lay’s history, when all hands were called to duty and all the stops were pulled out in creating and marketing
salty snacks for Americans of all ages. And it didn’t hurt that Frito-Lay’s owner, PepsiCo, was already battle-tested from its war with Coke.

PepsiCo was a marketing machine. A year after acquiring Frito-Lay in 1965, it had moved its headquarters from Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan to a sprawling campus in Purchase, New York, but no one at PepsiCo got sleepy in the suburbs. They prided themselves on being the aggressor in soft drinks, finding ways to embarrass and outmaneuver the Goliath, Coca-Cola, wherever they could. Dwight Riskey’s revelation about baby boomers setting records for consumption came just as Pepsi—which also now owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell—topped $1 billion for the first time in 1990. That same year, PepsiCo put a symbol of its mission—and our growing appetite—on the front of its glossy annual report. The entire cover was taken up by the portrait of a humongous sumo wrestler, in the ready position with his game face on.

A year later, in 1991, PepsiCo installed one of its most prized corporate warriors, Roger Enrico, into the top spot at Frito-Lay. The son of an iron-ore smelting plant foreman, Enrico would go on to run all of PepsiCo from 1996 to 2001 and come to rival Coke’s fabled chairman, Robert Woodruff, as a mastermind of marketing. But when he arrived at Frito-Lay, he was already a star of the soft drink division. It was Enrico who convinced Michael Jackson in 1984 to turn his hit song “Thriller” into a commercial for Pepsi’s “New Generation” campaign, and it was
Enrico who sunk New Coke a year later with the brilliant counteroffensive that touted Coke’s reformulation as a victory for Pepsi.
^†

As the CEO of Frito-Lay,
Enrico would deploy the marketing strategy known as “up and down the street,” using Pepsi’s delivery crews to maximize sales in convenience stores where America’s kids were forming their snack food habits. The crews began delivering Frito-Lay’s brands along with the company’s soda, and Enrico galvanized his snack food managers with exhortations to dominate the convenience stores. Dwight Riskey recalled
one speech that Enrico delivered to company executives in Orlando in which he groused that the beer company, Anheuser-Busch, was stealing some of Frito-Lay’s turf in potato chips with its Eagle Snacks brand.

“They had very high quality, and they were getting very good shelf space,” Riskey said. At Enrico’s urging, Frito-Lay scrambled to improve the crunch and the taste of its chips and lower its prices enough to spur increased sales. “I think we gained three share points a year for eight years in a row after that,” Riskey said. “It was an amazing thing to watch the company respond to the challenge that Enrico laid out. The guy was a business genius.”

The food technicians at Frito-Lay also stopped worrying about inventing new products like Topples, and instead embraced the industry’s most basic—and reliable—method for getting consumers to buy more food: the line extension. They took their existing snacks and spun them into endless varieties. The classic Lay’s were joined by Salt & Vinegar, Salt & Pepper, and Cheddar & Sour Cream. They put out Frito’s in Barbecue and Chili Cheese varieties, and Cheetos—which had nearly twice as much salt as potato chips—were transformed into twenty-one varieties.

These were no run-of-the-mill extensions. The science corps at Frito-Lay prided itself on quality invention, putting their all into the taste, crunch, mouthfeel, aroma, and overall appeal of each of these items. The ingredients they used weren’t extraordinary: fat and salt, along with sugar in some of the brands like Cheetos, as well starch from potatoes or corn and sundry spices. The magic comes in the weaving, and to get a better feel for this, I called on Steven Witherly, the food scientist who had worked on cheese sauces for Nestlé. Witherly has written a deeply fascinating guide for food industry insiders entitled “Why Humans Like Junk Food,” and I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos.

“This … is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure,” he said, ticking off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say
more
. A key one is the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth like chocolate. “It’s called vanishing caloric
density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it, and like popcorn, you can just keep eating it forever.” The only thing more spectacular than Cheetos, he said, was another Frito-Lay creation—the Doritos 3D, a puffy, spherical version of the flat chip: “The added dimension increases the surprise factor when you take a bite,” he said. And surprise is a very good thing for increasing consumption.