by Michael Moss
The Lunchables, however, used the regular products and were already a superstar in the Oscar Mayer lineup. It had gone from being a money loser—or, as Eckert put it, “a bleeder”—to being “a growth engine,” a foundation of the company’s profits. “We’re leading the hottest segment of the supermarket’s refrigerated case,” he said. That year, the Lunchables hit a string of milestones: 100 million pounds in trays sold, half a billion dollars in revenue earned, and $36 million in profits. Lunchables had come so far, so fast that Oscar Mayer was scrambling to find more places to make the trays. “We must expand manufacturing capacity,” Eckert told the tobacco executives.
Sugar wasn’t the only catalyst being used to advance the Lunchables sales. All three components—salt, sugar, and fat—would get hefty boosts. A line of the trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that scoffed at the federal government’s guidance on nutrition. These and other permutations had as many as 9 grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day’s recommended maximum for kids, with two-thirds of the max for sodium salt, and 13 teaspoons of sugar.
When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former CEO of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar, and fat in meals for kids, he did not dismiss the nutritional concerns that this raised. Indeed, he said, even in their earliest incarnation, Lunchables were held up for criticism. “One article said something like, ‘If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.’ ”
Well, they did have a good bit of fat, I offered.
“You bet,” he said. “Plus cookies.”
But speaking in general about the nutritional aspects of the products that Philip Morris sold through its food division, Bible said the company was in a tough spot. The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers—through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern—was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” he said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
Bible said the nutritional aspects of the company’s products were typically left in the hands of brand managers, who faced an uphill battle whenever they sought to introduce a new product. But given the consumer’s fickleness, the risks of failure were even greater if they tried to pull back on the keystones of their formulations, the salt, sugar, and fat. Bible said the most vivid example of this that he could recall involved Robert McVicker, a Kraft vice president for technology who died in 2001, and Michael Miles, the company’s former CEO. “Bob was very keen to get a low-fat peanut butter,” Bible said. “Peanut butter wasn’t a big business for us, but it was big in the country, so if you find one it could pay. But it was going to cost a lot of money. So Mike had a rule, which I thought was a pretty sensible rule. He said to Bob, ‘If you can find a brand manager who’s prepared to absorb the R&D cost, go for it.’ Now, if I’m the brand manager, and they say, ‘Geoff, this is probably going to cost you $5 million and if you want to put it in a test market, another $10 million, and then if we roll it out to a bigger test market, this thing will cost you $30, $40 million.’ And I say, well, ‘No thanks.’ You see your bonus disappearing. So it doesn’t work, unless you can find somebody who’s prepared to say, ‘Okay, I’ll take the punt. If it doesn’t work, I’ll eat the money, and I may lose my job, because that’s what I’m paid to do, pick winners not losers.’ A lot of these initiatives didn’t really get out of the box because it’s hard to find the funding, the champion who will get behind them. I think everybody did their best, but again, it’s what the consumer wants that we tend to make.”
When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add healthier ingredients. Back at the start, Drane had experimented with fresh carrots and sliced apples but quickly gave up on that; these fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. The carrots and apple slices wilted or turned brown within days. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but, like the low-nicotine cigarette, it tasted inferior, sold poorly, and was quickly scrapped.
When I met with Kraft officials in 2011 to discuss their products and policies on nutrition, they said that they were trying to improve the nutritional profile of Lunchables through smaller, incremental changes that were less noticeable to consumers. Across the Lunchables line, they said they had reduced the salt, sugar, and fat by about 10 percent, and new versions, featuring mandarin orange and pineapple slices, were in development. These would be promoted as healthier versions, with “fresh fruit,” but their list of ingredients—containing upwards of seventy items, with sucrose, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, fructose, and fruit concentrate all in the same tray—have compelled some reviewers to attack. “Snack Girl makes frequent visits to her local supermarket to check up on the latest,” Lisa Cain, a biologist and mother of two, wrote in November 2011, on the website she calls Snack Girl. “Guess what I found in the shampoo aisle? Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Lunchables! Right there next to shaving cream, toothpaste, and assorted hair products was Oscar Mayer’s kid friendly MRE (meal ready to eat) for our children. Now, if we were in a hurricane situation—I would say, ‘Stock up on those bad boys. They will last forever!’ ”
She added five “reasons to avoid” the new Lunchable: The sugar, at 37 grams, nearly matched that in a 12-ounce can of Coke; the $3 price tag far exceeded the cost of her homemade PB&J and fresh fruit; the packaging was not reusable; the bread was not 100 percent whole-grain; and the ingredients included “artificial colors, flavors and something called ‘carnauba wax’—I use wax on my floors and car—not for food for my children.”
Kraft has been deftly defusing criticism like this since the earliest days of the Lunchables, of course. One of the company’s counterarguments was that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day, so even the versions with the heaviest loads of salt, sugar, and fat were just part of their overall diet that parents could supplement with healthier foods. They also pointed out that there was nothing automatically healthy about the brown-bag lunch, if parents loaded them up with their own brownies and cookies and soft drinks. As for the kids, the company pointed out that they were unreliable—even when their parents packed fresh carrots, apples, and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat it. Once in school, they often trashed the healthy stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.
Kraft’s use of this notion that kids are in control of their eating dates back to the earliest days of the Lunchables. In 1994, when a pediatric cardiologist called the trays a “nutritional disaster,” a Kraft spokeswoman, Jean Cowden, shot back, “This is not some big corporate plot to fatten up kids. This is what kids want. There are very few kids out there who will eat rice cakes and tofu.”
This idea would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the fun, the cool, and most of all, the feeling of power it brought to their lives.
“If you had lunch with Michael Jordan tomorrow, what would you eat?”
That was the question Bob Drane put to kids in the mid-1990s, as his team began searching for tricks to keep the Lunchables sales growing. “And guess what came back?” Drane told me. “Pizza.”
It made sense. Pizza, back then, was booming. Throughout the country, sixty thousand pizza restaurants were turning out $26 billion worth of the stuff each year. Pizza had become the hottest convenience food in the country, which, in turn, only helped fuel the entire fast food market. The big chains—from Pizza Hut to D
omino’s to Jack-in-the-Box—which had generated $6 billion in sales in 1970, were pulling in nearly $93 billion by 1995, or roughly a third of all restaurant sales nationwide.
But what did this pizza insight possibly have to offer them, the Lunchables team wondered. All those pizzas and burgers sold by restaurants and craved by kids had something the Lunchables could never replicate: They came out of an oven. They were hot. Lunchables came off the shelf of the cooler section of the grocery store and then went into kids’ lunches from the fridge at home. Pizza would never be a possibility for them, right?
Wrong.
“We went through the Montessori School process again, asking, ‘What could a pizza be like that would fit into the Lunchables world?’ ” Drane said. “We started to make them, and they had this characteristic of being cold. They could have been heated but not as a carried lunch. It was impractical, so we created little crusts and little sauces and toppings and stuff and stuck them in a package and showed them to moms.” Not surprisingly, he said, “the moms told us, ‘This is an awful idea, a really awful idea.’ It was a disaster in the making, who would ever eat cold raw pizza, on and on. I think, in our testing, the concept got the worst score in our history.”
And yet, Drane wouldn’t let go of the idea. The potential windfall was just too huge. Not only were Americans buying $26 billion worth of pizzas from restaurants, they were spending another $1.7 billion on frozen pizzas they heated up at home. It was these frozen pizzas that gave Drane hope. Even when cooked, the crust on many of these was pale and soggy and tasted like cardboard. Surely, they could do better. So Drane and his team persevered, and a few months later, they encountered some good news. Moms may have been revolted by the idea of serving their kids a cold, raw pizza, but kids were a different story. The team whipped up a prototype; according to Drane, when “we showed it to kids, they said, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. I love it!’ ”
This disconnect between moms hating the idea of cold raw pizza and the kids loving it had to do with their distinct approaches to eating in general. Adults use their mouths when they eat, tasting whatever it is they are eating. By contrast, kids tend to use their eyes, judging the food—initially, at least—by how it looks. In a Lunchables with cold raw pizza, they saw nothing but fun. And to amp up the fun quotient, Drane’s team didn’t lay out the pizza in slices, as if it had been cut from a pie. They put it into the trays unassembled, in order to maximize the fun. The crust went into one compartment, the cheese, pepperoni, and sauce into others. That way, the kids got to make their own pizza right at school, while their schoolmates looked on with envy.
Kids weren’t the only ones being targeted, however. Lunchables, in all of its incarnations, were powered by some potent psychology aimed at moms as well. In the beginning, the trays were wrapped in a cheerful, yellow cardboard sleeve that evoked the image of a gift, giving working moms who felt guilty for leaving their kids something special to give them in the morning as they headed out the door. “The box was there as a gift, something precious to elevate its specialness,” Drane said. A few years after the launch, the cardboard sleeve was dropped in response to environmental criticism that the Lunchable was overpackaged. “It was one of those hold your breath moments,” Drane said. But the impression of gifting was already so well established, it seemed to work just as well with a sleeveless box. “People tend to buy out of the right side of their brain, using emotions, and so we learned over time that for moms, this was a gift for their kids, and for kids it was a badge for their classmates.”
Ultimately, it was the kids themselves who would make or break the Lunchables, so Kraft honed in on this concept of self-empowerment with all the marketing power it could muster. A few years later, the CEO of Kraft, Bob Eckert, put his finger on the psychology of this phenomenon of self-empowerment. “Lunchables aren’t about lunch,” he said in 1999. “It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.” Drane added, “Kids like to build things and play with food.”
In response to this targeting of kids, Kraft shifted its advertising strategy. (The first campaign had targeted mothers with a theme called “The Bad Week.” These ads proffered the trays as the solution to their mad dash to get out the door in the mornings.) As the focus swung toward kids, however, Saturday morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message, one of independence and empowerment.
“All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”
With this powerful marketing strategy in place and pizza Lunchables proving to be a runaway success, the entire world of fast food suddenly opened up for Kraft to pursue. Chains like Taco Bell were hooking America on the speedy, cheesy nature of “Mexican” food, so Lunchables came out with a Mexican Lunchables called Beef Taco Wraps. (Like the pizza, the taco filling was packed separately so that kids could be their own chefs at school.) Hamburgers, of course, were still the most popular fast food of all, and McDonald’s reigned supreme for kids with its Happy Meal, so Lunchables went after that too. It created the Mini Burgers Lunchables, packing the tray with two meat patties, Kraft processed cheese, two buns, and a choice between ketchup or mustard, soft drink, and a candy bar. The Mini Hot Dog Lunchable was not far behind, which also happened to provide a synergistic way for Oscar Mayer to sell its wieners. This was followed by a line of Lunchables that extended the product’s reach beyond lunch to other times of the day, including breakfast. By 1999, pancakes—which included syrup, icing, Lifesavers candy, and Tang, for a whopping 76 grams of sugar—and waffles were part of the Lunchables franchise as well.
This entire array was meant to be eaten cold, and the kids weren’t bothered by cold pancakes any more than they were by raw pizza. Annual sales kept climbing, past $500 million, past $800 million; at last count, it was close to $1 billion. In food industry parlance, the Lunchables became more than a hit: It became a category. And it sustained Oscar Mayer at a time when its red meats were flagging.
Eventually, more than sixty varieties of Lunchables and other brands of trays—including Armour’s Lunchmakers, which included a processed ham and cheese item called Cracker Crunchers and a Nestlé Crunch bar—were showing up in the grocery stores, mostly aimed at kids. In 2007, Kraft even came out with Lunchables Jr. for three- to five-year-olds.
Not surprisingly, much of this chilled processed food has been found lacking nutritionally. Convenience, of course, does have a price. Loads of salt, sugar, and fat are used not only to boost the allure of the foods; they are needed to make them safe for eating weeks or months after they were manufactured. And by 2009, when an advocacy group took a look at the explosion of fast foods in the grocery store, the price of this convenience was no longer being measured only in surging rates of childhood obesity. Children were succumbing to diabetes in greater numbers, a trend that was marked by some shocking studies. Nearly one in four American adolescents may be on the verge of developing type 2 diabetes or already have it, compared with one in ten in the 1990s. Type 2 is the most common form of diabetes, with obesity cited as the primary cause. In 2008, doctors who used ultrasound to peer inside the bodies of seventy children, many of them obese, found that kids as young as ten had the stiffened, thicker-walled arteries of forty-five-year-olds and other abnormalities that greatly increased their risk of heart disease.
The group, called the Cancer Project, that examined the prepackaged Lunchables-type meals, sized up nearly sixty ready-to-eat meals sold by grocery stores and found a nightmarish mix of salt, sugar, and fat in nearly all of them. Among the five rated worst by the group was a bologna and crackers kit sold by the Armour company, which delivered 9 grams of saturated fat, 39 grams of sugar, and 830 milligrams of sodium. Three of the worst-rated meals were from the Lunchables line, including, in the number one spot, a ham and cheese tray from the Maxed Out line. It had all the fat of the bologna tray, but with 57 grams of sugar—nearly 13 teaspoons—and 1,600 milligrams of sodium, which is two-thirds of the
daily recommended maximum for kids. Under pressure from attacks like this, Kraft has dropped the Maxed Out line and is lowering the salt, sugar, and fat in other Lunchables to improve their nutritional profiles.
Bob Drane had moved on to other projects before many of these Lunchables lines were developed. But looking back to the earliest days, when he secured the funding he needed from Philip Morris to ramp up production, he said that he was not surprised by their success. “All things started to become clear,” he said. “The volume goes up. The revenue goes up. The costs come down. The margins go up. The returns turn from red ink to black ink. You get what we call a platform, which becomes what we call a growth engine, and it goes on from there for a long, long time.”
In the trove of records that document the rise of the Lunchables and the sweeping change it brought to lunchtime habits, one item drew my attention perhaps even more than the memos detailing the tactical pursuit of moms and kids or the nudging and gushing praise from Philip Morris executives. It was a photograph of Bob Drane’s daughter, which he had slipped into the Lunchables presentation he showed other food developers. The picture was taken on Monica Drane’s wedding day in 1989, and she was standing outside the family’s home in Madison, a beautiful bride in a white wedding dress, holding one of the brand-new yellow trays.
I kept coming back to that photograph over the months that I spent researching the Lunchables. Something about it kept nagging at me. Was she really that much of a fan? I finally decided I had to ask her about it. “There must have been some in the fridge,” she told me. “I probably just took one out before we went to the church. My mom had joked that it was really like their fourth child, my dad invested so much time and energy on it.”
