by Michael Moss
Never in its 115-year history had Dr Pepper created a line extension, beyond a diet version. Given the cult following, the idea of tinkering with the soda’s unique taste seemed dubious, even dangerous. But with sales declining and the soda aisle changing, Dr Pepper had to act. In 2002, it created its first-ever spinoff, which by any measure should have been a hit. The new flavor had a rich cherry taste, a bold red color, and a name, Red Fusion, that had been carefully chosen from a field of three hundred candidates. “If we are to re-establish Dr Pepper back to its historic growth rates, we have to add more excitement,” the company’s president, Jack Kilduff, said. Research showed that Red Fusion would even attract new customers to the brand. One particularly promising market, Kilduff pointed out, was the “rapidly growing Hispanic and African-American communities,” where Dr Pepper had “lower brand development.”
But the sales force never got a chance to explore these new markets. Red Fusion’s failure wasn’t the fault of the company’s advertising crew. Rather, it was its taste. Consumers hated it, and diehard Peppers were aghast. “Dr Pepper is my all time favorite drink, so I was curious about the Red Fusion,” a California mother of three wrote on a blog to warn other Peppers away. “It’s disgusting. Gagging. Never again.”
Stung by the rejection, the company regrouped and spent the next year developing and testing a different variation. This time, the company’s technicians couldn’t even get it past the taste testers. The hope for a new soda died before going into production.
In 2004, Dr Pepper decided to go outside the company for help. It turned to a man named Howard Moskowitz, whose success in delivering mega-sellers had turned him a food industry legend. Trained in mathematics and experimental psychology, Moskowitz runs a consulting firm in White Plains, New York, where he has established a long track record of triumphs in consumer goods, from credit cards to point-and-shoot cameras to computer games. Much of his success stems from his ability to group consumers into segments, with different emotional needs, and target them with precision. He boosted sales for the jewelry company Shaw’s, for instance, by creating two versions of its brochure: one for people he categorized as optimists, the other for pessimists. The optimists got lines like, “I walk out of the store feeling great,” while the pessimists got reassurance: “Jewelry with a classic look.” As Moskowitz explained, “The importance here was not simply to identify these two different mindsets. Probably other methods might generate similar segments. Instead, Shaw’s was interested in what specific messaging would drive purchase. That is, once we know the segments, we know what to say, how to say it, and who to say it to.”
But Moskowitz’s principal focus—and success—was in the processed food industry. The jewelry market, after all, is one thing; shelf space in American supermarkets is another. The largest stores carry as many as sixty thousand items. The competition is utterly fierce to win space from the store managers who lord over their aisles with one maxim: The most space goes to the biggest sellers. Supermarket real estate is so precious, in fact, that consumer scientists have conducted experiments in which they place devices on the heads of shoppers to track their eye movements as they roam the store, and the gleanings from these studies has helped define the pecking order on the shelf. Down low, by the shoppers’ feet, not surprisingly, is death. Eye level is prime, especially toward the middle stretches of the aisle. The special displays at the ends of the aisle, called “caps,” are the best of all.
The main point of generating product line extensions is to win more space on the shelf. Store managers will give only so much room to any one product, no matter how briskly it is selling. Adding new flavors and colors creates new products that get their own space, and the more likely shoppers are to see a brand, the more likely they are to buy it. In Dr Pepper’s case, its space on the shelf was being devoured by Coke and Pepsi with all their new lemons and limes and vanillas.
There is another little-known aspect to marketing groceries that reflects this intense targeting of shoppers. The seemingly static, familiar nature of these stores is an illusion. Your supermarket today will not be the same store a month from now. To stand out in the crowd and excite the shopper, manufacturers constantly vary their mainline products, usually ever so slightly, with changes that range from packaging size to color to flavor to celebrity endorsements. Howard Moskowitz, however, doesn’t fiddle with ad campaigns or packaging when it comes to his biggest food projects. He reworks the food itself, playing with the magical formulations of salt, sugar, and fat. For more than three decades, he has worked behind the scenes to stage dramatic rescues, turning losers into hits. Campbell Soup, General Foods, Kraft, and PepsiCo have all come to Moskowitz for help when their sales have flagged or a competitor has gained an edge. And his goal in each case has been to find the bliss point. Moskowitz searches for just the right amount of certain ingredients to generate the greatest appeal among consumers. Too little of this or too much of that might not ruin a product’s taste or texture, but the shortcoming will be reflected in sales, where even tiny slippages can cause food company executives to lose their jobs. In the lingo of product developers, Moskowitz’s stock in trade is known as “optimization,” and he is not bashful in chronicling his deeds: “I’ve optimized soups,” he told me. “I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”
Moskowitz knows his way around fats, and more recently he has been working with food manufacturers to perfect their use of salt. But he is at his best when working with sugar, which has no equal in creating appeal. It is with sugar that his technique is most effective. And he doesn’t merely invent new sweetened products. Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. “People say, ‘I crave chocolate,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods?”
Conceptually, his technique is simple enough. Grocery products have lots of attributes that make them attractive, chief among them color, smell, packaging, and taste. In the craft called optimization, food engineers alter these variables ever so slightly in making dozens and dozens of new versions, each just a bit different from the next. These are not new products to sell. They are created with the sole intent of finding the most perfect variation, which is divined by putting all these experimental versions to the test. Ordinary consumers are paid to spend days sitting in rooms where they are presented with the many variations, which they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl, and most of all taste. Their opinions are logged and dumped into a computer, which is where Moskowitz’s training in high math comes in. The data is sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which determines what features in a product will be most attractive to consumers. Moskowitz likes to imagine that his computer is divided into silos, in which each of the attributes is stacked. But it’s not simply a matter of comparing color 23 to color 24. In the most complicated projects, color 23 must be compared with syrup 11 and packaging 6, and on and on. Even in jobs where the only concern is taste and the variables are limited to the ingredients, endless charts and graphs will come spewing out of his computer. “I mix and match ingredients by this experimental design,” he told me. “The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create, so I can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach.”
After four months of this work for Dr Pepper, in which he analyzed and then tested a slew of possible variations, Moskowitz and his team delivered the new Dr Pepper flavor. Dr Pepper, which for years had been trying to compete with Coke and Pepsi, finally had the hit it was looking for. It tasted of cherry and also of vanilla—hence the name, Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper—and it hit stores in 2004. It proved so successful that the parent company, Cadbury Schweppes, couldn’t resist selling the brand in 2008, along with Snapple and 7-Up. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group has since been valued in excess of $11 billion, a figu
re undoubtedly enhanced by Moskowitz’s labors.
The Dr Pepper project was extraordinary in one other way. The company wasn’t looking for new customers as much as it was trying to get its existing customers to buy more of its product, without regard to whether it was the original flavor or the Cherry Vanilla. Thus, the Moskowitz team’s campaign was for nothing less than the hearts and minds of the most devoted Pepper fans. They devised sixty-one different formulations, varying the sugar flavorings ever so slightly with each incarnation. They rounded up tasters across the country, and sat them down to a series of 3,904 tastings. And once all that testing was done, Moskowitz then performed his high math, searching for the one thing the food industry covets more than anything else, the defining facet of consumer craving: the bliss point.
I met Howard Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. He is a large man in every sense of the word, tall with sandy gray hair, and the club’s cushy chairs and refined breakfast menu suit him well. Moskowitz obtained his doctoral degree from Harvard in the late 1960s, adding a PhD in experimental psychology to his earlier focus in mathematics. In choosing a subject for his thesis, his professors gave him a choice between political polling and human taste, and for Moskowitz, the decision was easy. “I was young and thin, and had grown up in a kosher home,” he explained. “At Harvard I was eating hamburgers, fried fish, fries.” He went for the human taste. Back in the 1960s, so little was known about why people like the foods they do that Moskowitz focused on creating a scientific method by which researchers could study taste. He devised an experimental protocol in which he methodically created mixtures of sweet with salty, salty with bitter, and bitter with other flavors. He then walked around campus corralling guinea pigs, whom he paid fifty cents to taste the mixtures and tell him which ones they liked and which ones they did not.
When we first sat down, Moskowitz wanted to make it clear that, while he derived much of his income from large food companies, he was no industry sycophant. We started off talking about salt, which had become a hot-button issue for food manufacturers, who increasingly stood accused of oversalting their products to boost their allure. Manufacturers were failing to cope with the increasing health concerns about salt through no fault but their own, he told me. “They have a real fear of playing around with the products, and my own personal feeling is there is an intellectual laziness in the food industry. We talk a lot about taking salt out, but we don’t want to do our homework.” On the other hand, salt—with its long-term health issues—does not have the power of sugar in compelling the industry to act. Sugar is directly linked to body fat, and as a result, low-calorie sweeteners have opened up a huge market of people eager to look better by losing weight. “If all of a sudden people started demanding lower salt because low salt makes them look younger, this problem would be solved overnight,” he said.
We also talked about the obesity crisis, and while he has some suggestions for how the industry could help curb obesity—applying more rigorous research to the problem, for example—he said he had no qualms about his own pioneering work on the bliss point or any of the other systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave. “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said flatly. “I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature. As a researcher, I was ahead of my time, and I had to take what I can get. Would I do it again? Yes, I would do it again. Did I do the right thing? If you were in my position, what would you have done?”
Moskowitz takes pride in the science he brought to food invention. As he told a gathering of food technicians in 2010, “The history of your field wasn’t real science. There were no methods. There was no corpus of knowledge. Where did sensory research come from? It was a bunch of bench chemists asking why things taste good. And the market researcher was some hapless person trying to figure out whether the stuff would sell or not.”
His path to mastering the bliss point began in earnest not at Harvard but a few months after graduation, sixteen miles from Cambridge, in the town of Natick, where the U.S. Army hired him to work in its research labs. The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations, not less, when they are out in the field, running operations. “The problem in the military is the same as in nursing homes,” said Herb Meiselman, one of Moskowitz’s former colleagues at the Army labs. “When you go into combat, you reduce your eating, and if you do that for too long, you lose body weight.”
The soldier’s basic food in the field is the pouch of dehydrated rations known as the MRE, which stands for “Meal, Ready to Eat,” and the shelf life alone is an appetite killer. At Natick, the technicians laugh when civilian food makers complain about having to formulate their products to hold up in the grocery store for ninety days. Army rations must last for three years, in scorching heat. To address the body weight problem, the Army knew it would have to compete with the convenience foods that soldiers are accustomed to eating back home. “To get them to eat more, every year we’re coming out with seven or eight new entrees to test, looking at the trends, what’s popular in restaurants,” said Jeannette Kennedy, the project officer for Natick’s research on the MRE. “The beef patty did great at the beginning of the Iraq War but got taken out because it was not scoring well in field tests. So for 2012, we’re doing more than simple hamburgers. It’s Asian pepper steak and Mexican-style chicken stew.”
Natick was just starting to experiment with the MRE in 1969 when it hired Moskowitz. One thing was quite clear when it came to these packaged meals. Soldiers gradually began to find them so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this MRE fatigue was a mystery. “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” he said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”
This contradiction would come to be known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, this is the tendency for big distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by making you feel full, or satiated, really fast. Sensory-specific satiety not only helped shape the Army’s mass production of MREs; it also became a guiding principle for the processed food industry. The biggest hits—be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits—owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!
With the appetites of soldiers flattened by war, Moskowitz began to focus his research on the one ingredient that packs more allure than anything else: sugar. This was still the early 1970s, when scientists had little understanding of how sugar created such strong magnetism in food. Exploring the science of how sugar traveled from the taste buds to the brain to create cravings would require cutting-edge medical equipment, such as the full-body scanner known as the MRI, which would not be invented until 1977. Moskowitz, however, toiling in the drab, institutional Army labs at Natick, produced some of the first primitive studies on cravings for scientific journals with titles like “Taste Intensity as a Function of Stimulus Concentration and Solvent Viscosity.” Eventually, he hit a vein of research that, in years to come, would prove to be a rich strike for the manufacturers of processed foods.
Moskowitz initially set out to learn how to maximize the power of sugar in foods, conducting the same kind of taste tests he designed at Harvard. With the resulting data he created graphs that, he noticed, looked like an inverted U. They showed that our liking of food rose as the amount of sugar was increased, but only to a point; after that peak, adding more sugar was not only a waste, it dimini
shed the allure of the food.
Moskowitz wasn’t the first scientist to notice this phenomenon, but he takes credit for being the first to recognize its financial potential—an epiphany that came one afternoon in 1972, as a colleague looked over his work. This colleague, Joseph Balintfy, was a University of Massachusetts professor who was pioneering the use of computer modeling to create complex menus for hospitals and other institutions where large numbers of people had widely divergent nutritional needs and tastes. The Army labs had retained him to work on its menus. Balintfy was examining Moskowitz’s graphs on sugar’s allure one day when he pointed to the top of the upside-down U and said, “That’s your bliss point.”
“And I said, ‘That’s a great name,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “It’s just so sexy. What are you going to call it, the ‘optimum sensory liking’?”
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Moskowitz became a full-fledged industry star. By that time, he had married, and struggling to raise a family on his Army salary, he moved to White Plains, about twenty-five miles north of New York City. White Plains had become a magnet for some of the largest processed food manufacturers in the country, and shortly after arriving, Moskowitz started his own consulting business. The food giants were facing some of the toughest years in their history, transitioning from an era of smugness—in which almost everything they invented, from Hamburger Helper to Pringles, was a surefire hit—to getting called on the carpet regularly for lackluster sales by their ultimate master: Wall Street.
The largest manufacturer of all, General Foods, had come to be seen as a plodding dinosaur that feared innovation and relied too heavily on old products, including coffee—which, at $2.5 billion, accounted for more than a quarter of its annual sales—and frozen vegetables. The company, plagued by bureaucracy, was notorious for moving slowly in response to marketplace trends. The thousand people who worked at its vast research and development operations on the banks of the Hudson River were churning out precious few hits. One financial analyst dubbed it “one of the great ho-hummers among giant food companies.” In 1985, General Foods got a new lease on life when the tobacco giant Philip Morris acquired it for $5.75 billion, but that only intensified the pressure on the beleaguered food side executives. The tobacco company wasn’t being philanthropic. Philip Morris wanted a return on that investment, and fires were soon lit within General Foods to get the profits up.
