Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (28 page)

The slices, however, flopped. Consumers were put off by the whole concept; in this case, Kraft determined that the added convenience didn’t compensate for the pleasure people took in taking a knife to the brick themselves.

Fortunately for Kraft, the company had recently been purchased by Philip Morris, and its top lieutenant, Geoffrey Bible, had just arrived at Kraft headquarters in 2000 when the disappointing data came in, marking the cream cheese venture as a failure. He did not hold back in dispensing guidance to the cheese managers. To come up with winners, he reminded them, one has to think long and hard about just what it is people like.
“Now, I don’t mean to pick on Philadelphia Cream Cheese, because it’s a shining star in our product crown,” Bible said in one meeting. “But here’s an example of what happens when you take your eye off the customer and pursue an interesting technology too far without validating it first, with consumer input. We figured out how to create a cream cheese slice and put it on the shelf. It was a very impressive technological accomplishment. The question was did it really address a need? Sure, we were the only people in the world who could do it. Unfortunately, we were also apparently the only people in the world who cared. No one bought it. You know what we found out too late about consumers and their cream cheese? They’d rather spread it themselves! It’s fun! The great thing about cream
cheese is the wretched excess of how much you can glom onto your bagel in the morning. It turns out involvement is part of consumer need when it comes to cream cheese.”

The cheese managers took Bible’s words to heart. Cream cheese was no Oreo cookie, but it could be fun, too. They also saw no reason that they couldn’t adopt the marketing strategy deployed by that other great sugary product, Coke. If Coca-Cola could get people to drink more Coke by targeting those who already drank a lot, why couldn’t Kraft do the same with cheese? The managers even adopted Coke’s language, referring to cheese lovers as “heavy users.” To target them, they produced a new line of flavored cheese spreads called Kraft Crockery that hit on both these themes. “The fun is spreading,” promised the advertising.

In an internal memo on tactics, the cheese managers pulled back the curtain on their strategy. “These products will be targeted to people who snack on cheese, primarily heavy cheese users,” it said.
“Media selection will be skewed to female principal shoppers who are heavy processed cheese users, representing 67 percent of total processed cheese volume. The copy strategy positions Crockery as a whole new way to add fun, exciting new cheese tastes to any food.”

As sales of the Crockery line boomed, Kraft realized something else about cheese that made it every bit as attractive as sugary food, if not more so. People have their limits on sweetness. They can take only so much sugar in their food, and thereafter their liking—and sales—will drop. This is the famous bliss point that food scientists study and parse. But cheese is different. Cheese has fat, and as Adam Drewnowski in Seattle and other food scientists had discovered, the more fat in our food, the better we like it. This meant that cheese could be added to other food products without any worries that people would walk away. To the contrary, the added fat could be counted upon to make them more attractive.

Much of Kraft’s early efforts in this arena focused on the company’s famous Macaroni & Cheese. Known internally as “the Blue Box,” it sold for a mere $1.19 and was a stalwart seller. But it was the eighteen new versions—most of them featuring added cheese—that would push the Blue
Box into the club of elite mega-brands, with sales of $300 million a year. The lineup included Potatoes & Cheese, Pasta & Cheese, and Rice & Cheese, with each of the broad categories sliced into several subtypes, like Cheddar Broccoli, Cheddar Chicken, Cheddar Pilaf, and Three Cheese. In their strategy memos on this move, the cheese managers referred to the Blue Box “leveraging its cheesiest point of difference.”

Kraft used this same strategy to increase consumption of its packaged, just-add-meat dinners like Velveeta Cheesy Skillets, which featured added cheese and were spun off into varieties like Ultimate Cheeseburger Mac, Nacho Supreme, and Zesty BBQ Chicken. They sold for a mere $2.39, but contained up to fifteen grams of saturated fat per package—a fat load that soared even higher when the recipe was completed by adding the mixture to ground beef. In the television ad campaign for these meal supplements, a strapping and handsome blacksmith dips a ladle into a pot of melted yellow cheese and brings the thick velvety goo up slowly while singing, in baritone, “Liquid Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-ld.”

Kraft’s use of added cheese as a lure in its packaged foods, of course, sent other food manufacturers scrambling to keep up. As an analytical firm called Packaged Facts noted in tracking this gold rush,
“There exists an opportunity for cheese ingredients in every aisle of the supermarket.” Walmart, for one, started selling its own brand of soup called Loaded Baked Potato that included processed cheddar cheese, and contained 9 grams of saturated fat—more than half of a day’s recommended maximum. Its affiliate, Sam’s Club, came up with a four-cheese artichoke dip. Nestlé, through its Stouffer’s brand of ready-to-eat packaged foods, brought out a frozen Three Cheese & Ham Panini and added cheddar to its Grilled Mesquite-Style Chicken.

One of the biggest free-for-alls took place in the freezer aisle. Frozen pizza used to be made with the bare minimum amount of cheese, as manufacturers were always looking for ways to save on ingredient costs. But the new math on cheese turned that upside down. The more cheese that was added, the better the pizzas sold, and the better they sold, the more Kraft could charge. Kraft and other companies started turning out frozen pizza
that boasted two, three, and four different cheeses, including even a tangy blue, and then they tucked more cheese into the crust. By 2009, frozen pizza had reached $4 billion in annual sales, with Kraft alone pulling in $1.6 billion from DiGiorno and its other brands, and there appeared to be no end in sight.

For years, Kraft had been keeping an eye on the public’s concern about the health implications of eating too many fatty foods. In a confidential strategic plan the company drew up in 1993, Kraft cited this nutritional worry first among the topmost “weaknesses” in the company’s cheese-filled lineup of products. It possessed, Kraft lamented, “a portfolio weighted towards businesses in categories that lack vitality because they are out of consumer favor due to ingredient and/or fat orientation.”

And yet, the food industry’s rush to embrace cheese—the fattest of all fat-based products—as a way to increase sales put Kraft’s cheese division on a tear. In this same strategic plan, Kraft said,
“Competition is intensifying across all categories. Spending is up. Healthy Choice (Con Agra) has entered Cheese. Competitive strategies are converging, with all Peers trying to establish category leadership positions. Peer leaders are reportedly targeting 3+ percent annual growth volume. The implications for Kraft USDA is that we need to leverage our scale and do ‘faster, better, and more completely’ versus the competition.” By 1995, Kraft was reporting to Philip Morris officials that it had achieved a string of “strong years,” hitting $5 billion in revenue and two billion pounds in cheese.

With the industry working so hard to turn cheese into an ingredient to tuck away in other foods, the consumption rates climbed precipitously, with hardly anyone noticing. Even consumer advocates, in their efforts to steer Americans toward healthier diets, overlooked cheese. The Department of Agriculture, however, tracks all of the basic staples that Americans eat, and it has
kept a close watch on cheese. And nearly every year, the numbers in its tally set a record. Where Americans, on average, were eating 11 pounds of cheese a year in 1970, they were up to 18 pounds in 1980, 25 pounds by 1990, 30 pounds in 2000, and 33 pounds by 2007, when the rates dipped in the recession before resuming their surge.

Remarkably, the growth in cheese has mirrored the plunge in whole milk, which American consumers identified—mistakenly, it turned out—as the primary source of the saturated fat they wanted to avoid. Milk drinking went from 25 gallons per person in 1970 to the current average of six. For the country as a whole, trading cheese for milk has been a poor bargain indeed. The net gain per person at the current rates is roughly 200 grams of saturated fat a year. Few people, of course, realized how much more cheese they were eating. But by 2010, the floodgates for cheese—as an ingredient—were opened wide.

I
t had been twenty years since the sliced cream cheese debacle had subjected the cheese managers at Kraft to a scolding from the executives at Philip Morris. As the cigarette makers pointed out to the food technologists, playing with the shape of products was pointless without an equal amount of energy spent on divining the minds of consumers—that the “selling” of food counted as much as the food itself.

By 2010, however, the cheese managers at Kraft had fully internalized this message, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that they built one of their most spectacular “divination” campaigns around the same product that had defeated them before: Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

The operation they launched was called the Real Women of Philadelphia, and its stated goal was to capture some of the estimated $7.3 billion that shoppers were spending each year on fat-laden additives for cooking at home. This field was cluttered with sour creams, shredded cheeses, sauces, and canned soups as ingredients for recipes, and if Kraft wanted in, it knew it would have to do something special to stand apart.
“We couldn’t win in this category with a traditional approach,” Kraft said in an analysis of the campaign. “We needed to listen more closely and respond more generously to our customers.

“Philadelphia Cream Cheese
was happy to be America’s favorite schmear for bagels and main ingredient for cheesecakes. But growth had
flattened out, and our challenge was to find new reasons for people to buy our product. Our goal was to sell more product and shift brand perception toward cooking. We needed to encourage consumers’ use of cream cheese in their recipes and increase the frequency with which they purchased the product, a measurement that had been flat for five years.”

The idea was to identify women who cook and show them new ways to use cream cheese. Kraft, however, did not want to rely solely on traditional advertising. For all its power to influence shopping habits, large numbers of American consumers saw paid commercials for what they were: pure hype. Kraft believed it could increase the credibility of its marketing by having real people do the promoting on its behalf. Thus the slogan “Real Women,” and the concept was brilliant. This was like having a neighbor tell you over the fence about the new recipe she had tried that included cream cheese as a novel, luscious ingredient.

But Kraft didn’t want to rely on everyday women alone. It wanted someone of stature to lead them. Some companies trot out their CEO to stand up in TV commercials and lend some homespun credibility to the product, but many more realize what Kraft concluded, that it “didn’t have sufficient credibility to inspire broader use of Philly cream cheese. But a celebrity partner who oozed credibility, loved Philly, and used it a lot,
would
, especially when engaging daily with a community of ‘real’ women.”

Kraft needed Paula Deen.

Deen, whose appearances on the Food Network had turned her into a star, was perfect for the role. Her show, Paula’s Home Cooking, featured Southern-style fare that is heavy in butter, mayonnaise, and anything else with saturated fat as a main component. One of her demonstrations was fried macaroni and cheese. For this, she scooped baked macaroni and cheese from a casserole, wrapped the balls in bacon, and deep-fried them in oil. As one online reviewer who awarded the recipe five stars wrote, “It’s like eating pure cholesterol! Delicious and fun to make and eat!”

On Kraft’s behalf, Deen appeared on the daytime talk show
The View
and other television programs, joined contest winners in writing a cream
Cheese–based cookbook, and opened her vast social media network to the company’s new campaign for cream cheese. The centerpiece was a contest in which Kraft offered a $25,000 prize to each of four winners who came up with the best recipe that used cream cheese as an ingredient. And the contest was run by Deen.

Every week for four months, Deen starred in videos that aired on YouTube in which she would demonstrate the entered recipes, praise the winners, and show video snippets that contestants themselves had submitted. These videos, along with the other promotional work by Deen and a website that Kraft devoted to the campaign, produced precisely the reaction that Kraft had wanted. Home cooks deluged the company with an avalanche of recipes for using cream cheese in their cooking. It had taken Kraft’s own test kitchens a decade to devise five hundred recipes that deployed cream cheese, but the Real Women campaign put that to shame. It generated five thousand recipes in three months, which Kraft began promoting through the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google advertising.

Sales of Philadelphia Cream Cheese surged 5 percent almost overnight, the first increase the cheese had had in five years. More telling, shopper tracking data showed that while the traditional usage of the cream cheese as a spread had declined, its use as an ingredient had gone up.

The only glitch came in January 2012, when Deen revealed that she had been diagnosed with diabetes three years earlier. She made this disclosure in announcing a new deal to publicly represent Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest maker of insulin and other diabetes drugs. Much of the food world went nuts. The problem for Deen was the nature of the fat-laden cooking she’d been selling, which was viewed by critics as the surest path to diabetes.

Deen went on
The Today Show
to air her side, where she was interviewed by Al Roker, who had dealt with his own weight issues by undergoing a stomach-banding operation in 2002. When he asked if she planned to change her eating habits, Deen said she had never intended for anyone
to use her recipes day in and day out. “I’ve always encouraged moderation,” she said. “I share with you all these yummy, fattening recipes, but I tell people, ‘In moderation, in moderation.’ ”