The Tastemakers (16 page)

All of this threw the chia market, which had barely existed a few years before, into a frenzy, as increasing numbers of distributors, importers, and producers began buying up a finite amount of chia seeds. Sandra Gillot, the CEO of Benexia, a Chilean-based company that is one of the largest chia seed suppliers on the market, said that the demand went from “zero to a market that could take ten thousand tons of seeds, and the supply is only six thousand tons in a year.” Several droughts and weather events affected chia crops in South America during these prime years, and chia's price, correspondingly, shot through the roof in 2012. With chia seeds selling for more money per pound than filet mignon and, in some cases, rising up to 30 percent in a few months, new suppliers rushed into the fray to try to capitalize on the chia boom. People began planting chia wherever it could grow, from countries like Peru and Bolivia to experiments in America and the Philippines. One of the largest growers to emerge was the Chia Co., which only began cultivating chia in Australia in 2003 when the company's founder, a fourth-generation Western Australian grain farmer named John Foss, discovered chia while studying global health food trends.

Dole came late to the chia market, but as often happens along the progression of food trends, their entry was a game changer. Prior to the slow launch of the Dole Nutrition Plus label, in late 2012 the players in chia products were relatively new entrepreneurs, like Mamma Chia, or natural foods specialty brands, like cereal maker Nature's Path and Hain Celestial, which mainly sell at health food stores and higher-end retailers, like Whole Foods. The Dole Food Company, in contrast, is a $7 billion, publicly traded juggernaut with operations in ninety countries and more than three hundred products sold globally in pretty much every supermarket and corner store. When a company like Dole dips their toe into chia, even tentatively, it's a clear indication that the trend has entered the mainstream. As recently as 2007 Larry Brown and his partners at Salba were banging on the doors of companies like Chiquita Banana and
General Mills to put chia into their products, without any luck. Now, if Dole succeeded with it, everyone else would surely jump aboard.

A
few weeks before visiting Dole's headquarters in California, I had flown to Kannapolis, North Carolina, a former mill town outside Charlotte that was best known as the home of the Earnhardt NASCAR racing dynasty. Since 2008 it has also been the location of the North Carolina Research Campus, an array of massive regency buildings where universities, big food corporations like General Mills and Monsanto, and healthcare organizations conduct research into health and nutrition. It was largely paid for by David H. Murdock, the ninety-one-year-old CEO and chairman of Dole, who plans to live well into his hundreds and has committed millions of dollars to finding a fountain of youth in the vegetables and fruits he sells. His eponymous research institute is the core of the campus, and there is significant space devoted to Dole's nutrition research laboratory, where the company conducts most of its studies on the nutritional content of the products it sells, from fruits and vegetables to more processed foods. Everything, it should be said, is decorated in Murdock's style, which is a mixture of oversized colonial architecture, golden elephant statues, and gigantic sun-drenched murals of fruit and vegetable spreads, including a rotunda with an eagle soaring through it—almost like a cross between a WPA food poster and a gaudy Macau casino.

Marty Ordman met me there, along with Nicholas Gillitt, a British scientist who heads up Dole's nutritional research laboratory, and Brad Bartlett, the company's vice president of packaged foods. A native of Virginia Beach, Bartlett had the broad shoulders, confident demeanor, and pencil-thin mustache of a major league baseball manager, which was common among food industry big shots, and he'd invited me to visit the facility to illustrate a key point in the chia trend's evolution. “It's one thing to show a nutrient in a fruit or vegetable,” he said as we sat down at a conference table piled with Dole Nutrition Plus chia products, “but it's another to show how it
changes health.” Chia had grown to this point thanks to an aura around its purported benefits, but with Dole Nutrition Plus, the company was committed to backing up every single claim it made with its own scientific studies. “You get this mystique behind something without evidence, but then with research, it becomes true.”

Gillitt began going through the results of his research so far, which had demonstrated that Omega-3 ALA levels (believed to control inflammation) had only gone up in subjects when the chia seeds were milled into a powder. Whole chia seeds were statistically no different in their effect from whole poppy seeds, which meant that milled chia was more nutritious for consumers. Another study showed that ALA levels in the blood peaked two and a half hours after eating milled chia and left the body six hours after consumption. Gillitt theorized and was trying to prove that this was converted to energy during the time it was in the body, lending evidence to the folklore that chia provides a natural sustained energy boost—something Bartlett said the company could easily market in products like squeeze packs, juices, and energy bars targeted to marathon runners, long-distance cyclists, and other athletes. These studies were the core of chia's future with Dole, and Gillitt wanted to have a new study constantly ongoing in the wings, waiting to be released in order to stoke fresh demand for the company's chia products and the trend.

Chia represented what the food industry calls a functional food, a growing segment of ingredients with purported health benefits, a food that can drive sales when integrated into other food products. Several years ago I visited a complex at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg that dedicated itself to discovering and working with functional foods. At the time they were conducting large-scale trials on behalf of the Unilever margarine brand Becel, which was releasing a margarine with added plant sterols, a naturally occurring substance in vegetables that researchers believed could lower cholesterol. Test subjects came to the university each day to eat breakfast, which always included foods made with the sterol-fortified margarine (unless they were in the control group, who just got regular margarine). The study, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,
measured the cholesterol levels of the subjects over various periods of time to see what effect the margarine would have.

This one study represented a minute fraction of the studies food companies were conducting around functional foods all over the world. Though most took place at universities in the name of health science, all of them were driven by the search for increased profit margins of the food companies who funded them. The increased awareness around chronic health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancers, had created a tremendous amount of confusion with consumers, who wanted to do something to improve their health but didn't necessarily know what. If a company could convince them that their product, whether it was Dole's chia clusters, Becel's proactive margarine, or the latest flavor of Vitamin Water, would make them healthier, they would be more inclined to buy it—and pay a premium while they did. Bartlett estimated that a product with functional ingredients could sell anywhere from 10 to 30 percent more than a similar one without, and in an industry in which careers were built on wrestling away fractions of a percentage from your competitor's market share, that advantage meant the world to grocery-shelf warriors like Bartlett. “We chose chia because of its nutritional versatility,” Bartlett said. However, “to get big, chia has to go through the food supply more. It needs to be in chips, cereals, energy bars, clusters, squeeze packs,” all of which were relying on the results of studies to drive consumers their way.

Food companies have relied on studies and science to take advantage of health trends for many decades. In the 1920s the Beechnut Packing Company, one of America's major food producers with a big share of the bacon market, was concerned that Americans were eating lighter breakfasts, typically coffee, orange juice, and toast. To deal with this they contracted Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations and a master of marketing schemes. Bernays surveyed a number of doctors on whether they recommended a light breakfast or a hearty one that included bacon and eggs, and though the survey wasn't scientific (and Bernays had hand-picked the doctors), the hearty breakfast won out. Bernays then contacted scores of newspapers, which wrote stories about the medical “findings.”
The resulting change—and not just for Beechnut—was that Americans read these stories and began eating bacon and eggs for breakfast so enthusiastically that their collective behavior changed to the point at which bacon and eggs is now the prototypical American breakfast meal. In her monumental book
Food Politics
, Marion Nestle, arguably the country's preeminent academic figure on nutrition and food policy, detailed the modern ways that large food companies have used studies and science to support questionable claims in order to sell products. In 1984 Kellogg's implied in ads and marketing material that its All-Bran cereal, which was high in fiber, could reduce the risk of cancer, resulting in a nearly 50 percent rise of All-Bran's market share, the supermarket equivalent of a lottery win. Gum makers claimed chewing gum cleaned teeth, Quaker had mustachioed actor Wilford Brimley scare the crap out of TV viewers as he admonished them to eat their oatmeal and prevent heart disease, and Tropicana claimed its calcium-enriched orange juice would build stronger bones in children and adolescents.

One of the best-publicized examples of a food company wielding studies to create a new health and diet trend is the case of POM Wonderful, a California company that turned the previously underappreciated pomegranate into a must-have life tonic for Baby Boomers and the health conscious. POM was the brainchild of Lynda Resnick and her husband Stewart, a pair of fantastically successful entrepreneurs who owned the Teleflora flower delivery company as well as kitsch emporium, the Franklin Mint, and later, Fiji Water. In 1987 Stewart had acquired a hundred acres of pomegranate trees in California and planted hundreds more over the years, selling most of the crop to California's Middle Eastern population, who used pomegranates for cooking and holiday decorations. The Resnicks wanted to increase the pomegranate's reach, and seeing the growth of the functional food market and health trends, they commissioned costly studies at universities in America and globally to isolate the health properties of pomegranates. In her memoir,
Rubies in the Orchard
, Resnick recounts the results of the early studies, stating it was “jawdropping. Among the first findings: pomegranate juice inhibits inflammation and pain. In addition, pomegranates turn out
to be astonishingly rich in antioxidants, which inhibit oxidization of the body that can damage cells.” Pomegranates contained more antioxidants than “just about anything else known to humankind. In addition, the fruit was shown to reduce arterial plaque and factors leading to atherosclerosis. Subsequent studies suggested that pomegranates have a powerful effect against prostate cancer.” Further studies the company commissioned showed positive effects that could even impact diabetes, erectile dysfunction, and other ailments.

The company took these studies and turned them around, using the preliminary findings to heavily promote POM brand juices, antioxidant teas, supplements, energy bars, iced coffee, and fresh pomegranates with a flurry of advertising and far-reaching promises. I remember seeing posters in the New York subway all the time with slogans like, “Cheat Death,” with a torn noose around the telltale curvaceous bottle's neck, “Death Defying” as the bottle straddled a tight rope, and “Life Support,” with the bottle feeding an intravenous line. Another had the bottle rocketing through the sky, like a comic book superhero, claiming, “I'm off to save PROSTATES!” an ad that included a small link to the actual study itself. Suddenly POM juice, pomegranates, and antioxidants were everywhere, as the Resnick's turned the fruit into a multimillion-dollar business, unleashing dozens of pomegranate-hawking competitors. For several years, when I went to my parents' house for dinner, there was invariably a bottle of POM in the fridge and pomegranate seeds sprinkled over the salad. Chefs were basting chicken in pomegranate syrup, and bakeries were flavoring muffins with it. Everyone, from those selling pomegranate-flavored products to those eating them, boasted of its antioxidants and benefits, which expanded the trend to other fruits and foods as produce growers, importers, and distributors sought a slice of this fast-growing market.

Then Chinese goji berries were added to cereal and candy, and an entire industry sprang up around the exports of Brazil's açai berry, a bitter purple Amazonian fruit pronounced
ass-eye-E
. I had lived in Rio de Janeiro for a couple of months back in 2005 and ate bowls of sweetened, frozen açai slush for breakfast after surfing, but when I returned to Canada that same year it was basically
unknown. Fast forward three years, and açai was everywhere—in juices, in granola bars, in pills and powders, and even at the hamburger chain Wendy's, which featured a salad dressing with açai juice in it. Maine blueberry farmers rode a surge of demand from studies that showed blueberries were antioxidant rich, and everyone from Ecuadorian goldenberry exporters to California's Walnut marketers tried to get a piece of the antioxidant action by tying their product marketing to health claims (remember Glenn Roberts talking about the antioxidant potential of China Black?). The market research group Packaged Facts estimates that by 2016 the American antioxidant product market, ranging from pomegranate juices and snack bars, to açai-flavored cosmetics and supplements, will be as big as $86 billion in annual sales.