by Michael Moss
With these challenges in mind, the Corporate Products Committee on that winter day in 1990 took mere minutes to work through the company’s plans for marketing Marlboros in Hong Kong and the L&M brand in Germany and spent only slightly more time with the new non-returnable 7-ounce bottles that Miller was introducing to the eastern and southern states; they wanted to make sure these regions were considered “strong 7 oz. markets.” The committee then turned its attention to food—specifically, a discussion of one of the most profitable parts of its lineup: the beverages known as fruit drinks. Consumers were spending nearly $1 billion each year on powdered drinks, and the company’s own Kool-Aid, Country Time, and Tang brands were pulling in an 82 percent share. But as Bible and the other committee members opened their folders to examine the memos and charts that had been prepared on these beverages, the Kool-Aid brand seemed especially vulnerable. Kool-Aid was a throwback to the 1950s, when the flavored drink’s mascot, the smiling pitcher known as Kool-Aid Man, was created by ad execs to battle Coke and Pepsi with his warm and cuddly antics. Now, Kool-Aid looked to be fading fast into that storied history, as determined challengers were vying to shrink its take. It was the committee’s job to keep that from happening, and the Philip Morris executives listened quietly as the managers who ran the Kool-Aid brand presented the first in a series of plans that were breathtaking in both scope and strategy.
The schemes would all share one theme. Where some of these drinks were every bit as sweet as Coke, they wouldn’t be pitched like that, given the public’s increasing concern about its sugar load. In marketing these drinks to kids and their parents, the brand managers now working for Philip Morris would use something else to create allure. They would use fruit, or rather the intimation of fruit, to create an even more powerful image for their drinks: a chimera of health.
There was a touch of irony in tobacco executives coming to the rescue of Kool-Aid. The drink had been invented in 1927 by a Nebraskan man named Edwin Perkins whose other creations included Nix-O-Tine, a horrible-tasting mixture of herbs and silver nitrate that became a popular cure for tobacco addiction. But there was a certain marketing genius in the development of Kool-Aid that Philip Morris would have appreciated, one that set the tone for the current efforts to revitalize the drink.
Perkins was a mercantile wholesaler, selling various products to grocers that included bottled flavorings for drinks. These were mediocre sellers and cumbersome to distribute. So Perkins, who liked to tinker with mixes and powders, converted the flavorings into powders that could be easily shipped in packets. He called them Kool-Ade, later changing the spelling to Kool-Aid, and they were an immediate sensation. America readily took to the packets of artificial flavors, bright colorings, and sugar—until the Great Depression hit, after which sales skidded. By then, Perkins had ditched all his other products to focus on Kool-Aid, and with his company on the verge of bankruptcy, he came up with another inspired move: He slashed the price of his Kool-Aid packets from ten cents to five. And that did the trick. People no longer saw Kool-Aid as a frivolous luxury. At a nickel each, they saw the packets as an affordable way to enjoy soft drinks during the tough economic times. By 1953, when Perkins sold his company to General Foods, he was producing more than a million packets each day.
General Foods pushed Kool-Aid to far greater heights. Eventually, Americans would stir up and drink 569 million gallons of the stuff a year, and Kool-Aid would come to dominate the company’s lineup of powdered soft drinks—a lineup that topped $800 million in sales. But the brand began to flag again in the 1980s. This time, it wasn’t the economy. Soda was killing it, as the juggernauts of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo lured more and more kids to their bottled drinks. On top of that, General Foods was outmaneuvered by its rival. In 1987, General Mills introduced a product called Squeezit, which was really just a novel form of packaging. With 23 grams of sugar per serving, this brightly colored drink was sweeter than Coke, and kids went wild. Sales hit $75 million in the first year, which prompted the managers of supermarkets to make room for every one of the dozen flavors that General Mills quickly turned out. Suddenly, Kool-Aid was getting pushed off the shelf. Sensing the urgency, Bible and the Philip Morris Corporate Products Committee made fixing it a priority.
To regain this lost turf, the Kool-Aid team invented their own squeezable bottle, with an added touch: It had a bendable neck, which made drinking all the more fun. They named it Kool-Aid Kool Bursts, and in a detailed memo presented to the committee members, the brand managers laid out precisely how they would overtake General Mills. Much of the strategy involved promotion, including ways to target kids that Philip Morris executives themselves could no longer deploy in marketing cigarettes. Since 1965, the tobacco industry had sought to defuse the growing political pressure against smoking by not using promotional materials that were aimed directly at kids, including, for example, comic books. That didn’t preclude General Foods from using these magazines to sell sweet drinks, however. Indeed, it had completed a hugely popular six-issue run of The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man, published by Marvel comics and distributed, for free, by General Foods. But the campaign for Kool Bursts would go a step further. General Foods had mass-mailing lists composed entirely of the names and addresses of children, in order to better target them with promotions. In their memo to the products committee, the Kool-Aid managers said they would put these lists to work on behalf of the Kool Bursts: “Gain kid demand through targeted events using General Foods kid mailing list.”
But the real genius of their marketing plan was found in a contrivance that would appeal both to kids and moms. The drinks were made mostly with sugar, artificial flavors, and preservatives. In each plastic bottle, however, the company would add a splash of real fruit juice. It was barely half a tablespoon of juice, a mere 5 percent of the total formula, company records reveal, but the Kool-Aid managers already knew that even a hint of fruit was worth a zillion times its weight in marketing gold.
Fruit’s value had been established three years earlier in repositioning another of the company’s stalwart sugar-based drinks: Tang. In 1987, soon after Philip Morris acquired General Foods, the beverage managers put Tang into little boxes, added two tablespoons of real fruit juice, decorated the cartons with pictures of fresh oranges and cherries, and rebranded them the Tang Fruit Box. The results were gratifying, and not only in terms of sales. In 1992, the Tang Fruit Box won a coveted award from the advertising industry for an ingenious campaign that marketed the boxes as healthy and fun. The slogan was “Nutrition in Disguise,” which the company had trademarked for use in “soft drinks and powders, syrups and concentrates used in the preparation of soft drinks.” Besides the splash of real fruit juice, the “nutrition” part of this slogan was the added vitamin C, which had been a selling point for the original Tang. Moms who bought Tang Fruit Boxes were applauded for sneaking this good stuff into the hands of their kids via a drink that, to them, looked liked nothing but fun. This was compared to the other tricks parents use to disguise things like carrots, peas, and string beans in the food their kids ate or, as the ad called it, “four clever ways a mom can disguise nutrition.”
Building on this fun-but-healthy theme, the Kool-Aid brand managers didn’t stop with adding a dash of juice. The Kool Bursts were engineered to evoke the image of fresh fruit in as many ways as possible: They were made in a variety of imitation fruit flavors, including cherry, grape, orange, and tropical punch, and they were given the most enticing imitation aromas that lab technicians could devise so that when the bottles were opened, they emitted powerful fruity smells. Even the bottles promulgated the mythology of health: Their plastic sides were embossed with the shapes of fruit. The managers promised the committee that these fruit-evoking attributes would appeal to kids and, most crucially, to their mothers. “To kids 6–12, Kool-Aid Kool Bursts is the brand of beverage that is the most fun,” the managers said. “Fun means: the great taste of Kool-Aid, a burst of fruity aroma, and the most enjoyable package from which to dri
nk. To moms, Kool Bursts is the brand of ‘Fun Bottle’ that they know their kids will love. Moms can feel better about Kool-Aid Kool Bursts because it’s from a brand they trust.”
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.
The 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 f
ire 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.
