Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  By now, though, many cereal makers were not only adding sugar, they had made it their single biggest ingredient, pushing the levels past 50 percent. Post found it hard to improve on that, but Clausi gave the company an edge by tinkering with the way it looked. He invented the letter-shaped cereal Alpha-Bits, the idea for which occurred to him after dining on pasta one evening and realizing that cereal could also be made into interesting shapes, not just flakes. “We thought it would be attractive to kids,” Clausi said. “Alpha-Bits was being sold on the merit of the shape and the fact that it was a combination of oat and corn cereal, not as a candy.”*

  The hardest part in that venture was not optimizing the cereal’s sugar level but maneuvering around the bizarre way that cereals are made. Typically, the dough that forms the cereal is first extruded from oat flour and cornstarch and then shot by a cannon-like machine into a room-sized bin where a sudden drop in pressure causes the heated moisture in the dough to turn into steam, which cooks and puffs the dough into cereal. To retain the letter shapes as they flew across the room, however, Clausi had to formulate a combination of cooked and uncooked dough. Alpha-Bits inspired a whole slew of novel cereal shapes in the supermarket, starting with Post’s own lineup of Honeycomb, Crispy Critters, and Waffle Crisp.

  Clausi was proving himself to be expert at more than just chemistry. He was a gregarious man with great people skills. His outgoing nature made him something of an anomaly in an industry where the food technicians were prone to be introverts. Clausi moved easily between the laboratories, where the food chemists crafted their formulas, and the marketing offices, where the company aggressors, the sales executives, had a prickly view of the technologists who invented the company’s products. Clausi assumed the role of mediator, especially later when consumers began placing greater demands on the industry, asking for more fiber or less fat. The marketing executives would demand instant changes from the food technologists, and Clausi would intervene and smooth things over. “They would drive the technologists crazy,” he said. “They are instantaneous responders. When people want low fat, they immediately say to the technologists, ‘Make all our products with low fat!’ ”

  As good as he was, Clausi didn’t yet have the grand vision for what food inventors like himself could really achieve, vis-à-vis American eating habits. This he would get from Charles Mortimer, the executive who had called Clausi and the others from Battle Creek to the meeting in New York to discuss the bruising they had taken in the cereal wars. Mortimer had never clashed with the marketing side at General Foods. He was the marketing side, and he ran the division until he was named CEO of the company. As a child, Mortimer had been called “fatty.” He was a stocky kid, like Clausi born in Brooklyn, who grew up on meat and potatoes and was something of a bookworm. But as chief executive, he placed such relentlessly high demands on his employees for results that they gave him another nickname: “How-Soon Charlie”—as in, “How soon will you have that for me?” His eleven years at the helm of General Foods, from 1954 to 1965, were viewed as the company’s golden years: Sales doubled, earnings tripled, and General Foods led America to a different way of thinking about food.

  “Today, consumer expectations are so high and the pace at which new products are introduced is so fast that Mrs. Homemaker usually can’t say what it is she really wants—until after some enterprising company creates it and she finds it in a retail store,” Mortimer said in a speech to business executives the year he retired. “I cannot think of a single General Foods product which we were selling when I became chief executive eleven years ago which is still on the grocery shelves and has not been changed importantly and, of course, for the better.”

  Mortimer hadn’t called the Post cereal executives in from Battle Creek to chew them out. That wasn’t his style. He wanted to tell them to have courage in the face of combat with other cereal makers, and more than that, he wanted to put them back on the offensive. They could turn their position of weakness to one of strength, he told them, with only a little re-framing. If they were getting beaten by companies who were better at selling cereal, then they needed to figure out how to sell other things for breakfast. They might have to invent these things, because the homemaker couldn’t be counted upon to think them up. But the sky was their limit, he said, and there were only a few constraints that he would place on them. These foods had to be easy to buy, store, open, prepare, and eat.

  This drive for convenience had become his mantra at General Foods. His goal was to lead not only his own company into this brave new world: He felt so passionately about convenience, he wanted to engage the entire industry. In the coming years, he would share his ideas with executives from other food manufacturers and beyond, to all consumer goods. For now, however, in addressing his executives, Mortimer focused only on the company’s dwindling share of the breakfast market. “Who says the only food should be cereal?” Mortimer said. “You are not just a breakfast cereal company, you are a breakfast foods company.”

  To drive his point home, to get his employees thinking freely, he told them about the joyful scene in his own home when his own kids came trundling into the kitchen to start their day. They didn’t limit themselves to bowls of Sugar Crisps or Cocoa Puffs.

  “My daughter,” he said, “likes to eat cake for breakfast.”

  More than fifty years later, the words that Mortimer spoke that day still resonated with Al Clausi. As we sat in his office, he said that the cake story, along with the rest of Mortimer’s speech, was not simply inspiring. Mortimer’s exhortations gave him the means to pursue, and help, Mrs. Homemaker in a way that he had never imagined before. If she didn’t know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way. “That was a mind spreader,” he said.

  In his forty-year career at General Foods, Clausi dabbled in numerous aisles of the supermarket—even the pet food section, which, by Clausi’s estimation, was the easiest to transform. Until he and his colleagues put their minds to it, dog food had come in boxes and bags and was uniformly dry as a bone, utterly boring to the pooches. The problem was bacteria, which thrived in moisture. To keep the chow safe, it had to be dry. Having studied the chemical properties of sugar, however, Clausi saw another way. He figured out that adding sugar to the chow would keep the bacteria away even in moist conditions, as sugar acted like a binder to make the water inaccessible to the bacteria. The result was a dog patty dubbed Gaines-Burgers, which could sit on the shelf until they were sold, just as long as the dry stuff could. The idea of using sugar to ward off bacteria is now embedded in the production of many processed foods, especially when the fat content is reduced.

  The crowning jewel in Clausi’s career, however, had nothing to do with dog food. It showed up one day in another aisle in the supermarket, and breakfasts in America would never again be the same. Starting in 1956, he used his chemistry and people skills to transform a natural breakfast food, orange juice, into Tang, a laboratory product that was 100 percent, nothing-natural-about-it, synthetic chemical and sugar.

  The Tang project had started immediately after Mortimer’s pep talk in White Plains. Before returning to Battle Creek, Clausi visited his old laboratory in Hoboken, where he took Mortimer’s advice and tried thinking big. “Are you working on anything that people could eat or drink for breakfast?” he asked the technicians.

  “We’re developing synthetic juices, like orange,” the laboratory director, Domenic DeFelice, told him. “But we’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Can you let me see them?” Clausi asked.

  The Hoboken scientists had come up with some amazing concoctions, especially the orange one. It didn’t taste watery like other powdered drinks that Clausi had tasted. It had a fullness, a good mouthfeel, and the flavoring brought to mind real Valencia oranges. It easily beat out the taste of what most people were drinking for breakfast at the time, Clausi told me. “People didn’t have fresh orange juice back then like they do now,” he said. “They either had concen
trate, frozen like a hockey puck that took you half a day to defrost in the kitchen sink, and full of pulp, which children do not like. Or they had canned orange juice, which had a tinny, cooked characteristic.”

  But DeFelice and his lab crew had been in despair when Clausi came along. When they added in all the vitamins and minerals that were needed to replicate the nutritional profile of real orange juice, their drink tasted horribly bitter and metallic. Clausi listened to them, and then, with his diplomatic skills, he took the problem to the marketing side, where the director, Howard Bloomquist, said the technologists were being too picky—or rather, they were misreading the potential consumer concern. Bloomquist said that people mostly associated orange juice with vitamin C, not all the other nutrients the lab technicians were trying to add to their synthetic drink, and vitamin C, as luck would have it, was the one nutrient the technicians could add without hurting the taste. Clausi went back to the lab and urged them to forget all about the other nutrients they were trying to add. Thus was born Tang, the technician’s gift to harried breakfasters everywhere. Released in 1958, Tang blew away yet another of the chores that moms faced at breakfast time, and the General Foods copywriters had a field day. “New! Instant! Just mix with cold water,” the company ads read. “No squeezing. No unfreezing. Real wake-up taste. Always the same sunny goodness, glass after glass.”

  “Happiest thing that ever happened to breakfast,” said another.

  Tang was never intended to blow out the sugar levels of real juice, Clausi said. If people followed the instructions on the label and used only level teaspoons when scooping the crystals into their glass, Tang had only a bit more sugar than orange juice. But that was one of the beauties of Tang—its bliss point was readily adjustable. Just start rounding the spoonfuls, or throw in an extra, and Tang quickly gets as sweet as soda. The marketing power of this movable bliss point became starkly evident when General Foods began selling Tang in other countries. Clausi was on a marketing trip in China in the 1970s that included taste tests for Tang. “We started in Beijing, and the further south we went, the sweeter the people wanted the Tang,” he said. Today, with annual sales having pushed past $500 million, more Tang is being sold in China and Latin America—another part of the world where people have a high fondness for sugar—than in the United States.

  Tang had one other little-known attribute that contributed to its blockbuster status in the United States, albeit in a peculiar way. NASA, the space program, needed a drink that would add little bulk to the digestion, given the toilet constraints in space. Real orange juice had too much bulky fiber in its pulp. Tang, however, was perfect—what technologists call a “low-residue” food. When NASA heard about Tang, Clausi instructed a colleague: “Tell NASA we’re honored to be of service, and we’ll supply whatever they need—free of charge.” On February 20, 1962, John Glenn returned from his triple orbit around the earth and told reporters that the only good thing about the food aboard his spacecraft was the Tang. With that endorsement, sales exploded.

  In the days after Charles Mortimer’s exhortation to be more imaginative, the company’s cereal executives out in Battle Creek, Michigan, showed their own flair for thinking grandly. In 1961, they came up with an invention that could take the place of an entire real breakfast. It was another powdered drink, initially called Brim, and it was promoted as “breakfast in a glass.” The popularity of this new “instant breakfast” was guaranteed by its sweetness. Then, two years later, the Post inventors came closest of all to replicating the cake that Mortimer’s daughter ate for breakfast. They tooled their production plant to turn out two ribbons of pastry dough. A sweet fruity mash was smeared on the top of one, which was then covered by the other to make a sandwich that was cut into squares with edges crimped and then baked. These were called Pop-ups, and they met all of Mortimer’s criteria for convenience: They came in a box, could stay on the shelf for months, could be eaten on the go, and could be served hot without even needing to light the stove. The toaster would do. As with most food inventions, the sure sign of success was the speed with which it was copied. A few months after the squares were introduced, Post’s rival, Kellogg, executed an even more successful version of this breakfast pastry, which had scant amounts of actual fruit but loads of sugar, as much as 19 grams—more than four teaspoons—each. Called Pop-Tarts, some of the twenty-nine varieties make no pretense of being anything other than cake for breakfast, or cookies at least. Among the flavors: Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Chocolate Fudge, Cookies and Creme, and S’mores.

  The real beauty of this convenience was its elasticity. When sales flattened out forty years later, Pop-Tarts would be promoted not as a warm breakfast food, but as a “cold afternoon treat.” Sales shot up 25 percent, according to Kellogg’s account of its 2003 marketing campaign, when it found a rich snacking target: “The 30 million tweens aged 9–14 who possess an estimated $38 billion in spending power.”

  Every year in New York City, the top executives of companies that sold a wide range of goods gathered together under the auspices of the Conference Board, an august association best known today for conducting the “consumer confidence” survey. In 1955, the dinner speaker was Charles Mortimer, and he got right to the point. Food, clothing, and shelter were still important, he told the crowd. But now there was a fourth essential element of life that could be “expressed in a single word—convenience—spelled out with a capital ‘C.’ ”

  “Convenience is the great additive which must be designed, built in, combined, blended, interwoven, injected, inserted, or otherwise added to or incorporated in products or services if they are to satisfy today’s demanding public. It is the new and controlling denominator of consumer acceptance or demand.”

  There is convenience of form, he said, citing the Gaines-Burger dog food patties that Clausi had invented to be as soft as hamburger but so durable that they could sit on the pantry shelf until needed. There is convenience of time, like the grocery stores throughout America that were starting to stay open in the evenings to accommodate increasing numbers of women who worked outside the home. And there is convenience of packaging, like beer in bottles that used to have to be hauled back to the store but were now disposable, and the aluminum foil pie pans that were showing up on the grocery shelves.

  “Modern Americans are willing to pay well for this additive to the products they purchase,” Mortimer told the executives. “Not because of any native laziness but because we are willing to use our greater wealth to buy fuller lives and we have, therefore, better things to do with our time than mixing, blending, sorting, trimming, measuring, cooking, serving, and all the other actions that have gone into the routine of living.”

  As if on cue, time-saving gadgets and gizmos started arriving in the grocery store that year that helped the modern homemaker trade a little more of her new wealth for some extra time away from the kitchen. Ready-to-bake biscuits appeared in tubes that could be opened by merely tugging a string. Special detergents came out for electric dishwashers that had special compounds to get off the water spots. One entrepreneurial firm even made plastic lids with spouts that snapped on cans of milk or syrup for easier pouring.

  As more food companies followed his lead and conveniences arrived in every last aisle in the supermarket, there was only one real obstacle to the social transmutation that Mortimer had envisioned: the army of school teachers and federal outreach workers who insisted on promoting home-cooked meals, prepared the old-fashioned way. These educators numbered in the tens of thousands, and they were spread throughout the country, teaching kids and young homemakers not only how to cook from scratch but also how to shop to avoid processed food. Those preaching this ideal included a few thousand government employees known as extension agents, who worked for the federal and state departments of agriculture and who made house calls to teach young homemakers the ins and outs of gardening, canning, and meal planning with nutrition in mind. The main force of this army, however, was the twenty-five thousan
d teachers who taught the high school classes known as home economics. Home Ec was the field of formal study that taught how to manage a home and community.

  If there was anyone who epitomized the Home Ec teacher, it was a thirty-year-old former farmgirl named Betty Dickson. She had been raised in York County, South Carolina, a heavily wooded and historic part of the Piedmont region just to the south and west of Charlotte, which had been developed by Scotch-Irish settlers in 1750. The main crop on her parent’s farm was cotton, but they also grew their own vegetables. Dickson learned to cook from her mother, without even the convenience of a freezer. She made it to college and earned her teaching credentials, but it was these practical, low-tech skills from the farm that she passed on to her high school students. “It was teaching the basics,” Dickson recalled. “They knew how to boil water, or maybe not all of them. But we did the basic skills in preparing and making biscuits, or meat, vegetables, and desserts.” Part of the class work was simply learning how to shop. The town had a small grocery, where she could immerse the students in dos and don’ts. She had them prepare shopping lists to avoid buying those things they didn’t need and “to compare prices, because money was not as free as it would be.”

  Dickson belonged to the American Home Economics Association, whose founder, Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards, had parlayed her training in chemistry at MIT into a career as a consumer activist. Richards tested commercial foods for toxic contaminants; lobbied for nutritious, inexpensive cooked food in the home and at school; and pushed back on the notion that “convenience” should be owned and controlled by the processed food companies. Homemakers could do convenience, too, and even better, the association argued. To help make its case, the association conducted a two-layer cake experiment in 1957 that pitted a commercial mix against a homemade batter. As reported in the association’s journal, the homemade cake not only cost less and tasted better, it took only five minutes more than the commercial mix to prepare, cook, and serve. Moreover, for extra convenience, the homemade mix could be made and stored in big batches, for quick parceling out when a cake was needed.