Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (22 page)

The Philip Morris executives on the products committee had
a few thoughts of their own, asking about the test marketing, and wondered if each fruity flavor should have its own matching-colored bottle. Then they authorized the beverage team to spend $25 million on an initial advertising campaign, which sent the Kool Bursts on their way to eclipsing the Squeezit with $110 million in first-year sales. By 1992, Philip Morris was touting its success to its stockholders, noting that the beverage division was
showing “excellent” results “fueled by the national introduction of Kool-Aid Kool Bursts.”

Kool Bursts only whetted the company’s appetite for the marketing power of fruit, and fortunately for Philip Morris, the acquisition of General Foods had given it the means to fulfill that desire. It now had possession of the largest and most advanced research center in the processed food industry, and at the very moment the products committee was green-lighting Bursts, the scientists at this facility were putting the finishing touches on a remarkable bit of chemistry that sweetened the taste of sugar.

T
he facility was known as the Technical Center. It had been built by General Foods in 1957 to replace the old and crowded labs in Hoboken, where Al Clausi had invented instant Jell-O pudding a decade earlier. The new center consisted of four three-story buildings and was situated on a beautiful, sprawling campus near Tarrytown, New York, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. Nine hundred people worked at the center, including 530 scientists and their staff, all devoted to pioneering research in food.
Each of the major brands had its own crew and spacious laboratory. The Jell-O group lived on the second floor of Building Two. Maxwell House was on the top floor in Building Three, where it was joined by Kool-Aid in a suite of adjacent rooms.

On rare occasions, the technical center was opened to visitors who were treated to demonstrations of what science was doing for modern processed food: the creation of artificial flavorings, the process of ridding fats of their natural odors, and the engineering that allowed for high-speed production in factories. During one such open house in 1977, guests at Kool-Aid’s lab in Bay D-365 were told, “You can ‘taste for yourself’ why a balanced flavor system is important in powdered soft drinks, and you’ll find out why there is a close relationship between color and flavor recognition in beverages.” The center was a fun house of illusion and discovery for the technicians, overlaid by the excitement of seeing their experiments turned into blockbuster commercial products.

One such achievement came in 1990, when a small group of researchers
set out to improve on a keystone of processed foods: sugar. At the time, manufacturers had many ways to sweeten their products: corn syrup, dextrose, inverted syrup, malt, molasses, honey, and table sugar in granulated, powdered, and liquid form. They typically mixed and matched these various forms to achieve maximum allure at minimum cost. The chemical formulations of most of these sugars, however, have a key component in common: fructose. Fructose is a white crystalline compound of twelve hydrogen molecules sandwiched by six carbon and six oxygen, and it has one overarching quality that generated considerable excitement in the Kool-Aid labs. By itself,
fructose is much sweeter than the sugar in sugar bowls.

The precise role of pure fructose in commercial sweeteners is still widely misunderstood. Table sugar, whose formal name is sucrose, is half fructose and half glucose. Likewise, the sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup, in its most common formulation, is also roughly half fructose and half glucose. (In its earliest incarnations, back in the mid-1960s, the syrup had higher levels of fructose, thus the name.)

Fructose in its pure form was discovered by a French chemist in 1847, and 140 years later this white, odorless crystalline solid would prove to be a boon for the food industry. In the late 1980s, a commercial version called crystalline fructose first appeared on the market, and salesmen pitched it to food manufacturers as an additive with a variety of wondrous technological powers. Pure fructose is highly soluble but does not decompose as readily as other sugars, so it can remain effective for the long shelf life that processed foods demand. It resists forming crystals, which helps keep food like soft cookies from hardening. When baked, it delivers an alluring aroma and a crisp, brown surface that mimics the finish achieved in cooking at home, and when frozen, it blocks the formation of ice. As a result, fructose started turning up in a whole range of foods, from yogurt to ice cream, cookies to breads. The annual production reached 240,000 tons.

The
true power of fructose, however, lay in its sweetening powers. It is far sweeter than glucose, the other component of table sugar. On a relative scale, with the sweetness of table sugar marked as 100, glucose clocks in at 74, while fructose hits 173.

When the fructose salesmen called on General Foods, the beverage division was intrigued, but there was a problem. Fructose is very sensitive to water. This poses no trouble in syrup, but when fructose is left in its dry form, the slightest exposure to the moisture in air will cause it to cake. A packet or jar of Kool-Aid, in other words, would quickly become a brick. At the Technical Center in Tarrytown, the small group of researchers—who called themselves the
“Fructose Team”—was tasked with developing a noncaking fructose.

One of its members was Fouad Saleeb, an Egyptian-born chemist who amassed so many inventions in his three decades at General Foods that he became
known as the “Patent King.” Making fructose waterproof was one of his more exhilarating challenges. He kept it from getting moist by adding starch, and then used agents like calcium citrate, tricalcium phosphate, and silicon dioxide to prevent the caking. “It took us maybe two or three months to develop the anti-caking materials,” he told me. “With the rigid quality controls, we had to keep it for twelve more weeks at the highest temperatures to be 100 percent sure it was stable.”

Saleeb had to come up with one more invention before the company could put this noncaking process to work with Kool-Aid. General Foods needed to buy vast sums of raw fructose to keep pace with its production of powdered drinks, and the dilemma was how to store all that fructose before the anti-caking agents could be added. So Saleeb designed a gigantic diaper-like device to slip over the silos where it was stored to keep the moisture out. General Foods was now ready to reap the benefits of waterproof fructose, their new supersugar.

First, it allowed the company to cut back on the sugar in its powdered drinks by 10 percent or more, which would mean lower production costs and higher profits. In 1990, a General Foods manager named Toni Nasrallah
estimated that this move alone would increase profits by $3.7 million each year. And second, the lower sugar content gave the company a way to tout its formulas as drinks that are good for you. As Nasrallah wrote in a presentation to Philip Morris executives, Tang could now be advertised as having “10 percent less sugar with more orange flavor.” And Kool-Aid
could be made more attractive to moms with a similar claim: “25 percent less sugar than Coke or Pepsi.”

The lower-sugar claim would hold up only if consumers—often little kids—carefully measured their scoops of powdered Kool-Aid according to the label’s instructions. Still, reducing the sugar in products would seem like a solid step toward better nutrition and higher sales, given the bad rap that sugar was getting. The FDA was still unwilling to ascribe anything worse to sugar than tooth decay. But in 1990, the same year that General Foods developed its noncaking waterproof fructose, sugar was coming under attack from a variety of quarters. A
Yale study made headlines for finding that children who were given two cupcakes suffered a tenfold increase in adrenaline and exhibited abnormal behavior. Separately, the
World Health Organization proposed changing its nutritional guidelines to lower the recommended daily levels of sugar to 10 percent of a person’s caloric intake, citing various research that suggested links between sugar and diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity.

The WHO eventually withdrew that proposal after taking withering fire from the food industry, but sugar’s reputation sunk lower still as researchers launched an even more worrisome line of inquiry, linking sugar to addictive substances. In 1993, at the University of Michigan, a scientist named Adam Drewnowski took a fresh approach in examining the problem of bingeing, or compulsive overeating. Drewnowski knew there were links between sugar and addiction to opiates; studies showed, for instance, that sweets sometimes eased the pain of withdrawal. So he treated his subjects as if they were drug addicts.
He gave them a drug that counters the effect of opiates; called naloxone, this drug is given to people who overdose. Drewnowski then offered his subjects a variety of snacks—ranging from popcorn, which was low in sugar, to chocolate chip cookies, which were loaded with sugar, as well as fat. His findings: The drug worked best in curbing the appeal of the snacks that were highest in both.

If anything, high-fructose corn syrup has a worse reputation among consumers, though the issue should not be whether eating too much of the syrup is worse for one’s health than table sugar—
experts now agree they
are equally bad. Rather, at a time consumers were trying to cut their sugar consumption, food companies doubled down on the syrup—it’s cheap and convenient for manufacturing—which drove the production of soda and snacks to record heights.

Despite all the scrutiny, however, pure fructose has largely gotten a free pass—until now. New research on fructose is raising concern. (Nutrition science, it needs to be stressed, is generally far less authoritative than studies that involve rigorous, months-long trials, such as those for pharmaceuticals, so these studies on fructose, like those on sugar, should be viewed with caution.) In 2011 an independent group of researchers at the University of California at Davis reported on their examinations of pure fructose and they made what could be a significant find: In a two-week trial, they sequestered young adults in a lab to track their eating more accurately and gave them a drink at each meal alternately sweetened by glucose, fructose, or corn syrup. The glucose group emerged largely unscathed, but those who got the fructose or corn syrup beverages experienced a 25 percent jump in their triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, and a fat-binding protein, all markers for heart disease.

Kraft, when I asked about this new research, said fructose is considered safe by regulatory officials, but that it would “continue to monitor the research and respond to any regulatory recommendations that result.” John White, a veteran sugar industry researcher who helped develop sweeteners including high-fructose corn syrup, said he, too, is waiting for more studies to be done before rendering a verdict on how
fructose might be affecting the American diet. “The testing has involved high concentrations of fructose, so I think it’s premature to point at fructose,” he told me. Still, where fructose was once hailed as the innocent nectar of fruits, it is now looming large as a health concern at least as great as table sugar.

When it comes to flying under the public’s radar, however, even fructose can’t match the spectacular PR that food companies have garnered for a sweetener known as “fruit juice concentrate.” Typically made from grapes and pears, with a huge global market, this concentrate is now being added to a staggering array of products, from fruit leather to pastries to
cereal to almost any sweet product that the manufacturer wants to link to the healthy image of fruit.

Juice concentrate is made through an industrial process that is highly variable, including any or all of the following steps: peeling the fruit, thereby removing much of the beneficial fiber and vitamins; extracting the juice from the pulp, which loses even more of the fiber; removing the bitter compounds; adjusting the sweetness through varietal blending; and evaporating the water out of the juice. At its extreme, the process results in what is known within the industry as “stripped juice,” which is basically pure sugar, almost entirely devoid of the fiber, flavors, aromas, and or any of the other attributes we associate with real fruit. In other words, the concentrate is reduced to just another form of sugar, with no nutritional benefit over table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. Rather, its value lies in the healthy image of fruit that it retains. “The advantage that the fruit juice concentrate people have from a marketing standpoint is this product appears on labels in a very healthy context,” White, the industry scientist, told me. A company like General Foods can use this stuff and still put the comforting words
contains real fruit
on the box.

General Foods was not the first to recognize the marketing potential of fruit concentrate in processed foods, but it used this supersugar to great effect in one of its biggest moneymakers: a “fruit drink” called Capri Sun, which Philip Morris acquired in 1991
for $155 million. Five years later, in what Geoffrey Bible praised as a
“staggering” achievement, the drink reached $230 million in annual sales, with a volume that was rising a spectacular 26 percent each year. A portion of this success was due to some technical heroics in the factory, where engineers figured out how to retool the manufacturing process to cycle more quickly through the drink’s twenty-one flavors, which greatly enhanced productivity and the bottom line. But there was more to it than that. Like Kool-Aid and Tang, Capri Sun was sweetened mainly by high-fructose corn syrup, but it also now contained juice concentrate, which allowed the drink’s label to boast, for the first time, “Natural fruit drink. No artificial ingredients.” This was a
huge selling point for moms who, as a result, felt more comfortable adding the drink to their kids’ school lunches and snacks.

I asked Capri Sun’s former brand manager, Paul Halladay, whether the drink’s formula could have been altered to avoid using the fruit concentrate without changing the taste.
“Yes, you could do that,” he told me. “It was not a major part of the sweetener. But Capri Sun has always had some fruit concentrate. It helps with the validity of the ‘natural’ in the advertising to have the natural in there.”