by Michael Moss
Defending its chips on cholesterol was one thing. Sodium was quite another. Starting in 1978, the salt that Frito-Lay was loading onto its chips would cause it—along with the entire industry—to undertake some deft maneuvering in Washington.
If there was one consumer group the food industry came to fear the most, it was the organization called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, simply because it was so ruthlessly effective. Founded in 1971, this group of activists would grow to have nine hundred thousand subscribers to its nutrition newsletter, giving it serious clout—and not only in Washington. Its formidable legal team, wielding laws aimed at curbing false advertising, could generate such angst in the food industry that companies would often race to cough up reforms even before a lawsuit was filed. Since 2005, the organization has forced Kellogg to limit its advertising to young kids, Sara Lee to make it clear that its “whole-grain bread” is only 30 percent whole grain, and PepsiCo to change the labeling of its Tropicana Peach Papaya Juice to reflect the facts that it has neither peaches nor papaya and is not a juice. “We’re open to listening to legitimate concerns, and this seemed like a reasonable concern,” a PepsiCo official said in settling the Tropicana case.
The group’s executive director, Michael Jacobson, was trained as a microbiologist at MIT, and a few years after the group started up, Jacobson’s interest in salt was ignited. He had just finished a project examining the preservatives, colorings, and chemical processing aids being used by food companies in making their products. As scary as some of these might have seemed, he spotted the far more tangible and pressing target of salt. He saw how the country’s rates of high blood pressure were spiking, and how research was linking this scourge to sodium. Jacobson came to view salt—along with fat and sugar—as the biggest issues in processed foods. “I realized that conventional ingredients like salt were probably far more harmful” than the additives he had been studying, he told me. In 1978, he petitioned the FDA to reclassify salt from an ingredient, like pepper or vinegar, that posed no health concerns to a food additive that the agency could regulate by mandating limits or warning labels.
At Frito-Lay, Lin viewed the issues Jacobson raised as perfectly reasonable from a scientific perspective. He could quibble with the quality of the research, but he saw the basic premise as logical and agreed that excessive consumption of salt was a public health problem. Moreover, when federal regulators took Jacobson’s petition seriously and opened discussions on the possibility of regulating salt, Lin viewed this as anything but a threat to Frito-Lay. He saw this as an opportunity for his company. Frito-Lay’s most iconic product, the potato chip, had less salt than many other snack foods, especially pretzels, which clocked in with triple the sodium loads as potato chips. Lin thought the move in Washington to regulate salt could, in fact, give an edge to Frito-Lay. By moving swiftly to reduce its salt loads, he believed that they could capture a bigger share of the market. “Our products are already low in salt,” Lin wrote in a 1978 memo to other company officials. “However, since the public is consuming too much sodium from other foods, it would be wise to lower the salt content to enhance sales.”
Lin had only to look to Finland as an example of how the federal government could be a friend, not a foe. There, authorities were requiring manufacturers to label their saltiest foods with the “High Salt Content” warning, but they were also, importantly, incentivizing these same companies to produce lower-salt versions of their products. It did this by letting those companies with these healthier items promote them in a powerful way: They could label their boxes and bags with the comforting phrase “Low Salt.” This is where Lin wanted Frito-Lay to go.
So Robert Lin hurled his staff at the problem of finding a way to reduce the company’s dependence on salt. A handwritten document by his team entitled “Salt Strategy” shows how they pursued this goal from numerous angles, some involving considerable research and study. The initiatives they examined ranged from adjusting the fat content in potato chips in a way that could lower the need for salt to fiddling with the form of the salt crystals themselves in order to heighten their impact.
In this matter of altering the physical shape of salt, there were two competing schools of thought. One argued that larger crystals were the more efficient way to go, since they seemed to hit the tongue with greater force. The other argued for smaller crystals, which meant grinding the salt into a fine powder that created more surface area for the tongue’s saliva to interact with the salt and speed the pleasure-inducing signals to the brain. Lin reached out to salt manufacturers, prodding them for details on their varying grinds of salt. Large crystals or small, however, there was one matter, he knew, that Frito-Lay would hold inviolable: People would have to crave Frito-Lay chips for their salty and fatty taste. If this could happen with less salt, fine. But if there was even the slightest drop in allure, any talk about reducing salt loads would be dead on arrival. Lin understood this. “Generally speaking,” he told me, “the food that makes you feel good is the food you want to buy more. There is advertising, but the difference it makes is minor. Ninety percent of it is about making you feel good, and feeling good means tasting good.”
Long before he could test any of these decreased-salt techniques on focus groups, Lin would try to deal with the inefficiencies he saw. He visited a factory floor where Lay’s were being made, and as he stood at the salting station, he was struck—for the first time, really—by the utter lack of sophistication of the manufacturing process. The salt was just being dumped from huge bins onto the chips, which moved below on conveyer belts. The salt that didn’t stick to the chips simply fell to the floor, accumulating in huge piles, until workers came along to sweep it into garbage bins. Appalled by this waste, Lin started to tinker with a new method that would apply the salt much more judiciously. It used electrostatics to attach the salt to the chips the way a balloon sticks to the wall after it’s been rubbed on a shirt. In addition to greatly reducing waste, this technique could allow Frito-Lay to control the amount of salt that went onto the chips. But Lin soon saw the flaw in his plan: No one cared about the wasted salt, not even the bean counters at Frito-Lay. From a purely financial perspective, salt was so cheap—at ten cents a pound—that using less wasn’t worth worrying about. Lin shelved his electrostatic idea.
The looming regulation of salt, on the other hand, consumed Lin’s bosses. Increasingly, he was called upon not to unhook the company from salt but to defend the company’s usage of salt and attack its critics. Some of the company’s strategies were easy enough for Lin to fend off. When his colleagues suggested defending potato chips by touting their potassium content, Lin pointed out that the company’s chips did not have nearly enough potassium to offset the harmful effects of the sodium. Lin also warned his colleagues against overreaching in their attacks on research linking sodium to high blood pressure. “I advised them, ‘Don’t ever say salt has nothing to do with hypertension,’ ” he told me. But very quickly, the company’s campaign to push back on salt regulation went far beyond anything he could control.
In 1979, an FDA panel held a hearing in Washington on the proposal to regulate salt, and Frito-Lay turned out in force. As several company vice presidents looked on from the audience, the company’s research director, Alan Wohlman, made an impassioned plea on behalf of salt, citing its deep and historical roots in food production and preservation. He was joined by two medical authorities—a New York City cardiologist and a cancer researcher from Buffalo—who spoke on behalf of the Potato Chip and Snack Foods Association. The cardiologist said that the science of hypertension and salt was not clear, while the cancer researcher went much further in challenging the panel. He warned that, should the proposed regulations succeed in lowering the consumption of salt, Americans would face grave danger: People could die. The risks associated with too little salt in the diet, he said, were particularly high among infants and children, diabetics, pregnant women, and women using estrogen-based contraceptives.
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to-Lay reported on the hearing in an employee newsletter in which the president and CEO, Wayne Calloway, reiterated this warning: “After careful research, and consultations with noted medical authorities, it was clear that the Select Committee failed to consider the substantial risk to the general population if significant dietary restrictions on salt were imposed,” he said.
Robert Lin, who had joined in the preparations for the hearing, soon found himself swept up by the company’s all-out push to defeat the proposed regulations. With the FDA’s decision still pending in early 1982, he joined other Frito-Lay officials in having the company finance research on whether calcium might negate the harmful effects of salt. In a memo detailing these plans, Lin said he doubted that this research would absolve salt, citing other medical experts who felt the same way. But, he wrote, “From a strategic point of view, an effective promotion of ‘Calcium Anti-hypertension Theory’ may release the pressure on sodium for the time being.” At another point in the memo, he referred to the research as “powerful ammunition.”
When I asked Lin about the memo, he characterized the calcium research as a diversionary tactic that typified the company’s all-out scramble to defend its usage of salt. “There may be some people who believe calcium might work, but I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Pepsi is a good company, but they did some things not quite correctly, and one of these things was fighting salt. It was a macho spirit they had, which said, ‘Keep your hands off my company.’ ”
In the end, time was on the food industry’s side. The proposed regulation had surfaced during the last half of the Carter administration, which soon became preoccupied by matters like the energy crisis and the Iranian hostage situation. Amid all the bad news for President Carter, food industry lobbyists easily fended off the proposed curbs on television advertising to children. In 1982, federal bureaucrats were crouching in fear of the axe-wielding Reagan administration when the Food and Drug Administration finally responded to Jacobson’s petition on salt. The advisory panel that initially took up the matter four years earlier had sided with him, concluding that salt should indeed no longer enjoy its blanket designation as a safe food additive. Normally, the panel’s recommendation would have been adopted by the FDA, according to an official who later wrote an analysis of the agency’s decision. Indeed, the officials who ran the FDA at the time agreed that reducing salt consumption was a worthy goal. But this was no easy time for them to be aggressive in dealing with corporate America. Imposing government regulations on the food manufacturers was not in the cards. So instead of regulating salt, the FDA announced that it would try to wean the country off of salt through gentler means—by educating consumers on the health hazards.
Sanford Miller, who at the time was the director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told me that he and other agency officials were sincerely worried about the health effects of salt but believed that they did not have sufficient data to withstand the relentless attacks from industry lobbyists. “The salt people, especially, were constantly badgering us,” Miller said. Another top agency official at the time, William Hubbard, told me that the agency also worried that the public wasn’t ready to make the leap on salt. “We were trying to balance the public health need with what we understood to be the public acceptability,” he said. “Common sense tells you if you take it down too low and people don’t buy, you have not done something good.”
A disillusioned Robert Lin left Frito-Lay that year to join another side of the food industry. He went to work for companies that made nutritional supplements. Like other former food company executives I met, he also overhauled his own diet to avoid the very foods he had once worked so hard to perfect. There were few, if any, processed foods in the cupboards he opened for me. For lunch, he served plain oatmeal, with no sugar added, and raw asparagus. It was pretty stark eating for someone like me, who has been known to detour a vacation to visit a potato chip factory open to tourists. Then again, Lin, at age seventy-five, begins each day with an hour-long march up the big hill behind his house at a mean pace. By avoiding processed foods, Lin has slashed the amount of salt he consumes, which gives him mixed feelings. “When I see salty food, I still love to taste it,” he told me. “But I will stop at a certain point. Even though I like it, and can crave it, I’m educated. I know that my body is not designed for eating a lot of salt.”
His failure to change Frito-Lay aside, Lin’s years there were marked by a number of lasting contributions to the salty snack manufacturer. He believed in the power of intellect in problem-solving, and he established a forum where experts from outside the industry—a Shell oil president, a McKinsey & Co. research analyst, genetic engineering experts from universities in Washington and California—were invited to meet with Frito-Lay officials to discuss ways the company could be more creative in making and selling snacks. Lin sought out brilliance, wherever it might be. Among the invitees to a 1981 session was a marketing official from the tobacco company R. J. Reynolds whom Lin brought in to share what he’d learned about targeting consumers by studying every aspect of their wants and desires. This tobacco official, Greg Novak, was pioneering methods for sifting and sorting consumers by their age, gender, and race, the better to target them through specially tailored advertising, and Lin set the tone for this session by quoting an advertising executive who famously said, “Anyone who designs a product—or an advertising appeal—based on what the people say they want is an utter fool.”
Five years later, with Lin long gone, this notion—that industry knew better what people wanted—would help Frito-Lay sidestep the concerns about salt, as it ushered in a new era of snacking.
The year was 1986, and Frito-Lay was on a rare cold streak. They’d launched a series of high-profile products, only to see them go down in flames. There was Topples, a corn cracker with cheese topping that, true to its name, toppled right into the dumpsters behind the grocery stores. There was Stuffers, a corn shell with a variety of savory fillings, which got stuffed into those same garbage bins, as did Rumbles, a bite-sized granola bar snack that lasted barely a month on the shelves. Worried that they were losing their touch—along with $52 million in production costs—the marketing team brought in a ringer, Dwight Riskey, a budding expert on the cravings that snacks like these were supposed to generate.
Riskey joined Frito-Lay in 1982, just as Robert Lin was leaving. He had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and part of the team that had found that people could beat the salt habit simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. In his own projects at Monell, Riskey had conducted experiments that found that a person’s fondness for certain foods was greatly influenced by whatever else they are eating or drinking at the time. Your taste for a candy bar, for instance, changes when you are also drinking a Coke. This meant that the bliss point for sweet taste was not fixed; it could go up or down, depending on what else you were consuming. This added a somewhat more complicated, real-world factor to the efforts by food technicians to create the maximum appeal for their products. “I would find when you vary things like salt and sugar in a food, there tends to be one formulation that is best,” Riskey told me. “But the truth of the matter is, I could move that peak, that bliss point. I could move it up or down, depending on what other foods or beverages I put into the frame of reference.”
Bliss points also changed as people aged. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble launching new snacks. America was aging and growing less fond of salty snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this meant that their liking for salty snacks—both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate—was tapering off every year they grew older. Demographically, this would have a profound effect on Frito-Lay’s marketing strategy. Along with the rest of the snack food industry, the company anticipated lower sales due to the aging
population, and marketing plans were adjusted accordingly to lure new consumers. Advertising that had been aimed at baby boomers when they had been younger was scaled back. The thirty-five-year-old boomer was no longer targeted with ads like he was when he was twenty.
There was only one problem with this strategy, and it was a great problem for the industry to have. Snack sales didn’t decline as everyone had projected. Through the early 1980s, they went up. It was Dwight Riskey who figured out what was going on.
Riskey kept a second office at his home, a few miles from the Frito-Lay offices in Plano, where his desk and floor were papered with the charts, graphs, and printouts of his various marketing projects. Sizing up consumers and plugging them into specific categories was a critical part of marketing, and he put long hours into his work. In looking at the rising snack sales, he was determined to find out who—demographically—was doing all this eating. One Sunday evening in or around 1989, he was at home in his office when the answer suddenly hit him: He and his marketing colleagues had been misreading the data. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups but not the habits of these groups of people as they aged. This was an important distinction. The latter method is known in research as a cohort study, because it follows one group of people over time, and only this method could reveal how the habits of a group like the baby boomers were changing over time.
