Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (10 page)

“He said to me, ‘You’re a chemist, aren’t you? Here is this food company in New Jersey advertising for chemists.’ And I said, ‘What’s a food company want with a chemist?’ I had worked at an explosives plant in Niagara Falls, and I knew chemistry for petroleum, and chemistry for pharmaceuticals, but food? I took the job out of curiosity.”

The company was General Foods, which had its headquarters on Park
Avenue in Manhattan. But Clausi wasn’t headed to New York; he was assigned to an outpost in Hoboken, New Jersey. Clausi was given a desk in the research labs, which were housed in a small building on the waterfront. Nearby was the company’s massive production plant—home to Maxwell House, whose iconic neon sign of a tilting coffee cup towered over the Hudson. His first assignment had nothing to do with food. At the time, General Foods had a laundry detergent called LaFrance Bluing Agent, famous for “bringing out the whiteness” in clothes, and Clausi was given the task of modernizing the soap. More specifically, he was asked to change its physical structure from flakes to a powder detergent. This would become the hallmark of Clausi’s career, using chemistry to modernize consumer goods at a time when American consumption was being transformed with incredible speed. He was soon rewarded for his success on the soap with a promotion into the heart of General Food’s operations, which made the goods that were poised to change faster than any other: Clausi was put to work reimagining the company’s line of processed foods.

He was entering the business at an epic moment. The family-owned American grocery store was fast evolving into the supermarket, and food manufacturers were scrambling to fill the shelves with time-saving innovations that fed directly into the country’s frenzy to modernize. The locus of this movement, in fact, resided within General Foods itself, where a rising star in the marketing division named Charles Mortimer had embraced this transformation early on, and with great fervor. He even
coined the phrase “convenience foods,” a phrase that would galvanize the industry for decades to come.

At the same time, a network of professional homemakers across the country were struggling to keep America’s food simple and pure. These were the twenty-five thousand women who taught high school students how to shop and cook, and they promoted the ideal of home cooking with as much vigor as the food manufacturers were pushing the frozen, fast, and boxed. Among them was an unassuming South Carolina woman named Betty Dickson, who left her parents’ farm for a teaching career in the early 1950s, just as Mortimer and Clausi were hitting their stride at
General Foods. For the next ten years, these three—the chemist, the marketer, and the teacher—would compete for the attention of shoppers across the country. Their efforts mirrored the push and pull in the country between convenience food that wasn’t so healthy and healthy food that wasn’t so convenient. And nowhere did this struggle for the nation’s diet play out more fiercely than in the sugary products that Americans were now eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

By the time the acceptance letter from Johns Hopkins arrived, it was too late: Al Clausi was having so much fun in Hoboken that he had come to see food as his calling in life. He was just twenty-six, but following his success on detergent, the company handed him a much different project. He led a small team of researchers charged with updating one of the company’s icons, a mega-brand that epitomized American culture, but one that was also in grave danger of falling behind: Jell-O pudding. In those days, there was no such thing as instant pudding. The mix came in a box, but it took hours to prepare. “Pudding was a cornstarch-based product,” Clausi told me. “You had to add it to water, disperse it, and bring the water to a boil. The problem was, as you brought the water to a boil, it would coagulate and get thick, so if you didn’t stand there and keep stirring, it would stick to the bottom and burn. It was very demanding. You had to stay there over a stove, stirring this hot bubbling stuff to keep it from sticking. And once it got fully thickened—this took minutes and minutes—you would have to take it out of the sauce pan and put it in a pudding dish and that took another hour to get to room temperature. You wanted it cold, so you had to put that in the fridge to chill, another hour or two. So it might be ready at dinner if you started early in the afternoon.”

Knocking an hour or two off that ordeal would give a competitor a decisive advantage, the General Foods executives realized. They asked Clausi to get there first by inventing an instant formula.

Some food creations happen in a flash. Most take months.
This one took years. From 1947 to 1950, Clausi and his team cooked, ate, and breathed pudding. They tinkered with its chemical composition. They played with its physical structure. General Foods preferred using cornstarch
as the base, but Clausi’s crew looked at potatoes and every other starch they could find, including the sago palm, which Clausi tracked down himself after traveling, via prop plane, to Indonesia. Nothing worked. The problem was that, at the time, General Foods was staunchly committed to pure ingredients. Food additives such as boric acid, a preservative, and artificial dyes were showing up in more and more items on the grocery shelf, but General Foods knew that consumers had deep trepidations about these ingredients, especially those that were synthetic. Clausi’s marching orders, then, had been quite strict: He was to create his instant pudding using only starch, sugar, and natural flavorings.

That all changed in the summer of 1949 when he returned from two weeks of fishing in the Catskills to find that all hell had broken loose.
A competitor, National Brands, had filed for a patent on instant pudding by using not one synthetic but a blend of synthetics, including an orthophosphate that was usually added to drinking water supplies to prevent corrosion and controlled the acidity of foods; a pyrophosphate, which thickens foods; and water-soluble salts like calcium acetate, which extend shelf life. On his desk that first day back was an envelope marked “Open Immediately.” Inside was National’s patent application. And when he went to see his boss, the section head of desserts, Clausi was told that the rules had changed, public fears be damned. “He said, ‘Marketing wants us to outdo the competition,’ ” Clausi told me. “That it was urgent. And when I asked if it still had to be 100 percent starch, he said, ‘That’s all out the window. Just come up with an instant pudding that can be made in thirty minutes.’ Overnight, the constraints were removed. Now it was, do whatever you could to develop the pudding, and that opened the door. We studied National’s patent and saw that it was using a chemical called acetate. Calcium acetate, a chemical that caused the milk to gel and that gave it the structure, so to speak, so it simulated the cooked pudding. However, it had a weakness: It kept on thickening. The chemical reaction didn’t stop. It took fifteen minutes to get to an edible stage, and if you didn’t consume it within five or ten minutes, it kept thickening until it got almost rubbery.”

Clausi began spending a lot of time in the General Foods research library,
studying the chemical composition of milk. After a few months of tinkering, he settled on using two different chemicals to simulate real cooking. One, a pyrophosphate, coagulated the milk, while the other, an orthophosphate, acted as an accelerator to hasten the thickening. They allowed him to develop an instant, no-cook pudding that was so much better, more stable and lasting. “Not only did it gel,” Clausi said. “It would happen within five minutes, not fifteen minutes, which was what the competition was doing. And then it would stop. It wouldn’t continue to get thicker and thicker and eventually end up like rubber. So overnight, we had a superior product with the Jell-O name, and we just took over.” The National Brands version never made it into production. Clausi’s formula became a bedrock hit for General Foods.

I first interviewed Clausi in the summer of 2010. We met at the office he keeps in Greenwich, Connecticut, an hour north of New York City, where he still works on various projects for the food industry. He was eighty-eight years old, with a full head of white hair and thick-framed reading glasses, which dangled from the neck of his short-sleeved shirt. By the door hung a copy of Patent No. 2,801,924, the instant pudding that had made him a legend at General Foods, and on the wall behind his desk was a gigantic wood-framed collage of some of the thousand women and men who worked for him at the company’s research complex in nearby Tarrytown, New York. On a shelf opposite his desk was a toy replica of the trucks that delivered Tang, another of his iconic inventions. As we spoke, he moved easily through his four decades at General Foods, stopping now and then to dig through his collection of files that held speeches, planning documents, and other internal company records, which he kept in a couple of cardboard boxes. Food additives were a recurring theme.

The public, at times, would grow quite concerned about additives, Clausi said. Especially when a troubling incident made headlines, as it did in the early 1950s when several children were made sick by Halloween candy that contained excessive amounts of a dye called Orange Number 1. By 1960, companies had come to rely on so many additives to process, preserve, color, and otherwise treat their foods—there were fifteen hundred
flavorings alone—that federal regulators moved to reconsider a host of additives they had previously approved. But one of the staunchest opponents to this move in Washington was none other than General Foods, the same company that had once put handcuffs on their young chemist Clausi, barring him from using any chemicals in pursuing an instant pudding. Executives there now belittled the federal decision to question these additives, calling it an overreach by bureaucrats. General Foods had come to embrace Clausi’s view that the use of chemicals in foods was more than justified, as long as they were used safely. The improvements they made to processed foods were critical to the industry’s mission, which wasn’t just making money for the company’s stockholders. America’s population was surging, and the industry saw its role as nothing less than nurturing the masses by delivering food that was safe, easy to prepare, and affordable. This was a mission critical to America’s success, and yet it stood to be compromised by watchdogs who overreacted to the isolated incidents in which the chemicals caused harm. “All the sensible people, whether they were from academia, government, industry, or even the public sector, knew that we needed these chemicals and wanted to be sure what we were using was controlled and used properly,” Clausi said. Moreover, as additives go, the phosphates he used in creating instant pudding for the Jell-O brand have raised little concern among scientists. Only in large amounts do they appear to pose any kind of health risk, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, today agrees. (It has a chart that sorts more than 140 additives by their toxicity risk, and phosphates are categorized as safe.) In time, the public concern about the potential toxicity of chemical additives with long scientific names would be eclipsed by a more basic concern about three others with the simplest of names: salt, sugar, and fat.

Clausi would come to see his tussle with General Foods over chemical additives as an invaluable lesson, one that would guide him through the next forty years of food invention. The company’s initial refusal to let him use chemicals had almost cost it dearly. No longer would he or the army of food technicians that he would soon lead at General Foods hold themselves
to some antiquated notion of what was wholesome or proper in processed foods. “I learned something there which I always remembered,” Clausi told me. “And that is, if you want innovation, tell me where you want to go, but don’t tell me how I must get there.”

On the marketing side of General Foods, however, where Charles Mortimer toiled before becoming the company’s CEO, there was something else about Clausi’s pudding that was firing these executives up, something much bigger than a few phosphates whose names they couldn’t even pronounce. In their view, the patent that hung on his wall with the prosaic title “Pudding Composition and the Process of Producing the Same” had done even more than just beat the competition. It had shown how the use of an additive could tap into, and help shape, an entirely new way of thinking about food. The advertisements they created for the pudding captured their own excitement as well as that of the public.
“Quick! Easy!” one ad said, depicting a placid and smiling mom in her sparkling kitchen as her two kids looked on. “New Busy-Day Dessert,” said another. “You can make and serve it at the very last minute!”

Still, the additive they were excited about on the marketing side of General Foods wasn’t phosphate or any other chemical. These wouldn’t turn General Foods into the biggest and richest food company in the world. Rather, it was the artful way in which the pudding—an instant hit—was making life easier for consumers who were increasingly harried by modern life.
When Mortimer emerged from the marketing side in the early 1950s to run the whole company, he would have a name for this phenomenon. He called it “convenience,” and it wasn’t just any old additive, he said in one of his speeches, this one to an industry group. “Serving the modern consumer has become a creative art, with convenience the super-additive that is changing the whole face of competitive business.”

Instant pudding had made Clausi the company’s go-to guy in a crisis, and it wasn’t long before the young problem-solver had his chance to shine. In 1952, he was pulled out of Hoboken and sent to Battle Creek, Michigan, where the company’s Post division was in dire need of help. After years of unbroken success, it found itself in a fight to the death over breakfast cereal.
And no chemical additive would help this situation. It would require something more basic: lots of plain sugar and Mortimer’s drive to create convenience.

F
rom the late 1800s through the 1940s, the cereal sold by Post—along with those of the other big national brands—had been crisped and flaked and puffed but only modestly sweetened, if at all. Cereals were sold as healthy alternatives to what much of the country was eating for breakfast: spam, bacon, and sausage. Indeed, the physician who had invented the cereal flake, John Harvey Kellogg, was quite a stickler on sweets, running his cereal company from a sanitarium where he banned sugar altogether. That all changed, quite suddenly, in 1949, when Post became the first national brand to sell a sugar-coated cereal, which allowed the manufacturer, and not the parents, to control the amount of sugar that went into the cereal bowls of children.
Post introduced a string of concoctions with names like Sugar Crisps, Krinkles, and Corn-Fetti, and kids everywhere went nuts.