Michael Moss: A Journey into the Underbelly of the Processed Food Industry

this is a production of Cornell University thank you so much and I've um I've brought my little friend prey with me which I hope all you teachers in the room are using other than PowerPoint these days because it doesn't have words it just has cool little pictures which maybe will still uh put you to sleep um thank you so much for having me I've been really lucky to talk to um students in a bunch of places like Yale and Princeton and Harvard and MIT and Santa Barbara and Berkeley and and UCLA and to Public Health groups in wonderful conference places like Disneyland or Physicians dealing with obesity and diabetes in places like uh Saudi Arabia here for this recent talk but I've never been able or allowed to actually read from my book salt sugar fat and I'm going to do that here today and by the way I laugh every time I see the cover because it was designed by this crazy Russian igr who lives Upstate in New York who to do it went into his grocery store and pulled out his favorite products off the shelf and brought it back to his studio and hand ripped the lettering out of them and rearrange letters to reflect what is really going on about the products that he and I and you probably to some extent love so deeply um which of course is what the is what the book is all about and I'm and I'm actually not going to read from the book but I'm going to cite a couple of facts from it um in 2002 the largest food company of all Nestle paid $2.6 billion for the hot pocket brand that Frozen microwavable delicacy that became a poster child for let's say exuberant snacking and five years later Nestle acquired the rights to this drink which helped it Corner the market on one of the grimmest results of Ting every year in this country some 2 200,000 people undergo bariatric surgery to physically shrink their stomach as a way of helping them to actually eat less um so gorge on the Hot Pocket get fat on the hot pocket and then eat through a tube was Nestle's Market strategy if you will get them fat get them thin it's on page 337 of the book so imagine my surprise now summer before last when I got a call from none other than Nestle's research and development organization on the lovely shores of Lake Geneva asking me to come give my book talk to their secret Gathering not secret private Gathering of 60 R&D people maybe 70 or 80 from all over the world that they had they had gathered um and um and my first reaction was what and when I told my son Aaron who is with us in the audience today about it his reaction was I hope you're not spending my future tuition money on a roundtrip ticket to Geneva because there's no way they're going to let you come back home they're proba to shove you off the matter horn but but know that the the R&D team had a new head Who convinced me that he was trying to turn a corner at Nestle they had read the book they were responding to changing consumer demands and in order for them to do good they needed to hear more from people like me about all the bad things that they had done and remember though this is the richest company in the food business or certainly is from year to year Nestle is the owner of 29 of what it calls the billionaire Brands as one of its research scientists put it to me Nestle is the Swiss bank that prints food but I decided to go in part because I wanted to know what their 350 phds were up to these days who work on exclusively on food so I went I actually took Aaron with me as a as a bodyguard this is the group right before I got up to give my little Spiel and and I'm giving you a little bit of the shortened version of what I said to what I said to Nestle um and I started out with the fact that in 2008 I was actually in Algeria writing about Jihadi militants when a couple of FBI agents showed up at the New York Times headquarters looking for me I had been traveling in to Iraq and to the middle East first tormenting the Pentagon for failing to equip American and then Iraqi Soldiers with armor and then looking at how the war in Iraq was was fueling the ability of recruiters uh in other parts of the world to recruit new jihadis like Abu Omar here whose job as he showed me was building better and more uh deadly IEDs to to kill more Americans and I ended up in Algeria writing about insurgents there uh when the newspaper decided it was probably time for me to come home and find something safer to do and I mentioned this really only because I went from one war to another I was having coffee with my editor at the New York Times on the 14th floor cafeteria and I think I was still pitching her a story about us arm sales overseas something like that when she said to me you Michael what do you think about peanuts and I go come on Christy I mean let me tell you about these missiles and there's tear gas and it's going here and she go she goes no no listen to me there's been an outbreak of salmonella in peanuts being manufactured by a factory in Georgia on the Alabama border and people are getting sick all over the country and I'm still kind of demurring and she's going look Michael think about it an investigative editor like to think of bass notes for big potentially big stories to work on she's look you know these peanuts aren't being manufactured by China or some other far off place we can't blame them for this one this is of our own making thousands of people are being sicken they're even people starting to die in Most states across the country and these peanuts are you being used by as ingredients by this1 trillion processed food industry about which we really really know very little and sure enough when I went down to Georgia and spent some time reporting on the ground that outbreak became the story about how that industry had lost control over its food chain weeks and weeks were going by and the largest companies were still trying to figure out if they were using those peanuts in their products and then eventually recalling those products to ensure um safety of consumers and my reporting on on food safety next took me to um to to Minneapolis Minnesota um where I was incredibly lucky to come across a trove of documents that allowed me for the first time to tell the story of the making of a hamburger that sickened many people uh because of an eoli contamination including Stephanie Smith here she was a 22-year-old dance instructor who had a burger at her mom's house for Sunday supper one week and a week later uh coming out of a a forced coma she was paralyzed from the waist down because of the of the eoli in the hamburger and and Stephanie allowed me to sort of put a human face on this Trove of documents and the story of that contamination was an industry that intentionally avoided knowing about its food chain in order to avoid costly recalls they did not want to trace back um the hamburger sources to um to the slaughter houses because that would then be traced forward to other uh other manufacturers in this case it was Cargill um uh creating the hamburger and I was I was having dinner with one of my best sources Monsour here who tests pathogens for the meat industry and by the way it was Monsur who Chipotle hired recently to turn its company around from a food safety standpoint me but he said to me you know Michael is as tragic as these episodes of contamination are you really should look at what my industry he was talking about the imun industry is intentionally adding to its products over which it has absolute control and he was talking about none other than Salt especially huge in processed Meats which got me thinking about sugar and got me thinking about about fat as well and so that that became the impetus to the research and the reporting that that took me through for the book and and one of the first things I had to Grapple with was well of course we already know that eating too much of food I like to call the stuff we hate to love can make us you know unhealthily overweight and otherwise ill but once again I was amazingly lucky to come AC across a mountain of documents emails and white papers and memos and strategy papers that put me at the table of the largest food companies in the world as they were formulating and strategizing and marketing their products and it was those documents that enabled me to identify key players in those companies and then convince them to talk to me and open up and tell me even more secrets about their work and and the overwhelming sense of that material in those interviews which is which is what the book is about is is a sense that this is an industry that's driving 247 not just to get us to not just like their products but to want more and more of them there's no word that they hate more than than the aw addiction and they will justifiably argue that look you really can't compare you know Oreos with with drugs or what have you and and and I think that there's some validity to that but they don't even need to use the a word in describing their efforts to maximize the Allure of their products they talk about maximizing snackability and craveability one of my favorite terms is morish these aren't English Majors right these are bench chemists marketing people describing their effort and look it's it's not like it's also not like this is this I view this as this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us overweight or otherwise ill I mean these are companies doing what all companies want to do which is to make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible the problem lies in their own sort of deep dependence on using gobs of salt sugar and fat to sort of get to that um get to that sort of Ideal product in their in their eyes which is low cost convenient and utterly irresistible um I was incredibly uh lucky to spend time with a legend in the industry named Howard mosow which who's responsible for many of the icons in the grocery store he was trained in high math at Queens College and then experimental psychology at Harvard and and Howard walked me through one of his recent Creations which was a new soda flavor for Dr Pepper in which he started with no less than 60 versions of sweetness each one just slightly different than the next and subjected those to his 3,000 plus consumer taste tests around the country and then took the data thre it in his computer did his high math regression analysis thing and out came uh typically charts like this a bell-shaped curve where at the top of the curve is not the dreaded middle C you get in school but rather the perfect amount of sweetness not too little not too much it was Howard moscowitz who coined the term the Bliss point to describe that perfect amount of sweetness and when you talk to nutritionists you realize that the problem is not that the food industry has created or in Howard's word engineered Bliss points for things like ice cream and cookies and soda things we know and expect to be sweet it's that they've marched around the grocery store adding sugar to products that didn't used to be sweet before so now breads have added sugar and an engineered Bliss point for sweetness some yogurts can still have as much sugar pres serving as ice cream one of my favorite spots in the grocery store is the pasta sauce aisle where some Brands can have the equivalent of a couple of Oreo cookies with a sweetness and a tiny half cup serving and what this does is teach us to EXP respect sweetness in everything we eat which is a real problem for kids especially because they are born hardwired for sweet taste so when you drag them over to the produce aisle and try to get them interested in things like brussel sprouts and celery and broccoli you're going to get a rebellion on your hands um but it's not just sugar of course if if you were to draw a drug analogy which I hesitate to do but if you were to compare sugar to amphetamine fat to the food industry is the opiate for its also very powerful very subtle way of sneaking up on you not with a bliss point but with what the industry calls the mouth feel because as you all know um fats are still not quite accepted as an official taste but rather that sensation uh thanks to the trigeminal nerve of biting into a warm toasted cheese sandwich you can tell I'm a bit of a salt and fat guy cuz the reward center of my brain is going off because that's connected to the to the to the pleasure centers of your brain just as much as as as sugar is and one of the things the industry learned with fat is I write in the book that they could use the excess processed cheese that they were generating as an ingredient in processed foods to increase the Allure of those products and so that's why sandwich shops U through a very strategic um uh joint venture between industry and the government began offering and promoting and marketing cheese on Every Sandwich you eat and you can walk through the grocery store and so many products now have added cheese in it not not cheese for its own lovely sense of eating but cheese as an added ingredient with those those extra calories and then there's salt of course which is a strange creature I don't even know what the drug analogy to salt is I mean these days it's methadone because they're they're trying to come up with salt substitutes right because our salt consumption typically is like so much higher than than certainly some some scientists think we we we should be eating because of the the links to high blood pressure and and and heart disease um but the real eyeopener for me was was the moment when I asked some of the larger food companies why are you using so much salt not in things I expect to be salty but just in your your across theboard processed foods and none other than Kelloggs invited me in to show me what salt meant to them and not only did I get to tour their R&D Factory but they sat me down and prepared for me special versions of some of the biggest icons in the grocery store without using any salt in them at all and so we started with the um we started with the Chee itss which I managed to take a little snapshot of here normally I could eat those day in day out but without salt we couldn't even swallow them they tasted they stuck rather to the roof of our mouth because salt adds texture and solubility we moved on to the frozen waffles put them in the toaster and they came out looking and tasting Like Straw because salt adds color and flavor and then we moved on to the Corn Flakes put them in the bowl added some water taste a took a took a took a bite and before I could say anything the chief spokeswoman for the company was sitting there she gets this look of horror on her face and she swallows and blurts out the word metal I taste metal m e t a l the chief technical officer is there and he starts chuckling and goes yeah not not everybody will get this but one of the one of the beautiful things that makes salt such a miracle ingredient to us is that it will mask some of the off notes bad taste that are inherent to some processed foods in this case some of the added minerals to the Corn Flakes would give you what I had a sensation of one of my fillings coming loose and sloshing around in my mouth and that's when I really got it which is as dependent as we become on large amounts of salt sugar fat the industry itself is even more dependent on them which is a real problem for it now because those same companies like Nestle are now trying to change um but I went on with nestling and said look as you guys know it's not just salt sugar that it's the marketing of course that goes into the products and increasingly marketing people began to run the largest food companies I had a wonderful time with Ed Martin who was part of a SWAT team at Kelloggs when they were losing market share to General Mills and he told me how they sat around one day and they schemed up this thing called Rice Crispies treat cereal and they they they and and they thought that's a great idea let's give it to the technicians and let them work it out and the poor technicians came back and pulling their hair out said we can't do it I mean every time we tried to add marshmallow to the cereal it turns to Mush and mush is the death of cereal so the marketing people went back to their Consumer Panel and said look we can't quite do this guys help us out and they said well look you don't really have to give us marshmallow you you you can probably just give us the sensation of of marshmallow The Taste the flavor or the smell and that'll be powerful enough for us in the co the industry coin the term permission we will give you permission to fool us if you just get close enough to the real thing rice s treat cereal without the real marshmallows became a huge hit for for Kelloggs um I spent a whole chapter on the Lunchables because it's just it's just absolutely fascinating I got I got to meet and spend lots of time with the inventor of the Lunchables Bob Dr Who who just you know who who who who was still amazed to this day that they managed to turn you know little pieces of processed cheese and processed meat and crackers something nobody would be even interested in eating necessarily into a billion doll a year brand that kids would get excited about but at one point in the process they learned and decided and were were sort of known for saying among themselves that that they realized that Lunchables wasn't about the food as much as it was the badge value the the the the the great Buzz that gave to the kid who pulled one of these Lunchables out on the lunchroom he or she became the cats meow of the lunchroom and so they came up with that slogan for the kids all day you got to do what they say but lunchtime is all yours the food industry is incredibly smart about hitting finding and hitting those emotional buttons which really for for for for much of the time is what drives us to to to um to eat and then of course there was Jeffrey Dunn for 20 years he was the fiercest Warrior at this company he rose to become president of cocacola for North America South America Jeffrey Dunn walked me through K's pioneering of the suis me phenomena where they they decided they could make more money by offering unlimited amounts of drink uh soda Coca-Cola to people in restaurants because really the ingredients didn't cost that more even for the Mega sizes um the the warlike language wage they used in their competition with Pepsi where they would refer to their best customers people who would drink two or three Cokes a day or more not as their best customers but as heavy users and and they're targeting of people like Tatiana here um who I caught up within a corner store in Philadelphia knowing that when kids walk into a store with a little bit of their own spending money and make those first decisions about what to buy they will become imprinted on that product on that brand and that's why Coke the Envy of solid food manufacturers around the world focused so hard on putting Cokes in the hands of kids at ballparks knowing that sort of that joyous moment of a kid being with their parent and getting that product in their hand it was worth was worth gazillions in advertising um in implanting that that wonderful memory in in the kid's head um and of course there's the analogy to Tobacco which isn't just an analogy many of us have forgotten that back in the 1980s the largest tobacco company in North America eventually the world became the largest food manufacturer Philip Morris through its acquisition of General Foods the old food conglomerate out of New York um and craft and I was lucky to spend time with um some of the some of the former CEOs of Philip Morris explaining to me how they lent some of their marketing practices for cigarettes to their food managers um at craft and general foods which also led me to write about in the beginning of the book sort of this this wonderfully powerful moment back in 1999 when the heads of the largest food companies got together privately by brought together by cabals of insiders within their own companies who are becoming increasingly concerned about their culpability in the growing obesity not just obesity but other Health crisis and up before them stands a senior official at the biggest company of all craft he's armed with 72 slides including this one here that he's showing to the CEO and he lays at their feet responsibility not just for the growing um obesity situation but diabetes uh gout several types of cancers and he pleads with the executives to start doing something meaningful to turn a corner and in part reformulate their products to be truly healthier um he sits down and as I write in the book one of the biggest most powerful CEOs in the room stands up and is visibly angry and says look we are already sensitive to what consumers want if they want a low fat this or a low sugar this we make it it's on the Shelf there they have options but you've got to remember that we are also beholden to shareholders and there is no way we're going to mess around with the company Jewels referring to salt sugar fat if that's uh if that's going to lead to lower sales because we would not be responsible then to those shareholders and by and large that's still the basic story of the food industry today even though it's changing oh and because it was Nestle I reminded them that they uh were sending boats like this up and down the Amazon finding new ways to Market their products to people who were still entirely cooking by scratch figuring out they they could sell many versions of their products and all the big companies are doing it um uh to the emerging middle class in uh in Brazil um and then I sat down and I spent the next two days at Nestle oh by the way to some some mild mildly Pleasant Applause from the the R&D people uh spending time with them looking at sort of what they were doing to reformulate their products and I have to say it was it was fairly impressive I mean they're taking they're they're they're trying to minimize or reduce the amount of salt that they're using by um by taking it out of products internally and concentrating it on the surface of products so it provides that that that um what the industry calls flavor burst sort of immediate medely to the tongue and the live and the reward center so you can get basically more bang for your buck um they showed me how they were taking fat globules and expanding the surface area um so you would have more contact of the fat with your mouth for again bigger mouth feel bang for the uh for the buck and of course how they were trying to replace caloric sweeteners with with non-caloric sweeteners in changing some of their products like the like the hot pets but but here's kind of the rub and and in in in some ways I have a bit of a confession too because as much as I focused on salt sugar fat and as much as I talked about the solution to the problem of companies adding too much salt sugar fat is obviously reducing the salt sugar fat when you talk to nutritionists that's typically not the first thing that they say to you the first thing they will say to you is that we all need to be doubling the amount of this stuff that we eat um and if we do that we're going to be way more than halfway home to to Better Health from the food that we have um and and and kind of even the rest of the stuff will start to some extent taking care of of itself and so I started and when I asked nesle about that and there scientists I said look okay I appreciate that you're reducing the salt sugar and fat and these products but but what are you doing to stuff the Hot Pockets with this stuff I got a Blank Stare because in fact that's one of the most difficult things for the processed food industry now which is not decreasing the bad boy ingredients in their products it's increasing the good stuff is a real challenge for them and so I started thinking about well what would what would my food Giants exuse the possessive what would my food Giants do if they suddenly had to start selling fresh vegetables and fruit and the and the and the cynics Among Us would probably guess well they would smother them with cheese sauce or fried caramel glazing but no if the rules was they had to sell produce as it was without ruining the nutritional profile of the what would they do and I'm convinced they would sort of go to their tried and true three things that make processed food so um so successful they would make it more convenient they would make it um they would make it more um more lower C they would lower the cost of it and they would do things to make it if not irresistible at least more interesting in order to increase consumption um and I think probably you know for the for the for the lower the cost they would go to the agricultural community and say hey guys remember how we told you to grow soybeans and field corn which are the Staples of our Foods forget that we want you to grow fresh vegetables and fruits now and sure enough in the midwest I ran across a extension programs which were teaching field corn and soybean Farmers how to switch over to grow vegetables and increase increased Supply if not demand in that way um lo and behold I also ran across your very own Thomas borkman here who is working on the R&D end of things because last time I looked the industry was spending $2 billion a year on research and development to make soy and corn more profit a for farmers and I had trouble coming up with a mere $100 million in research and development for all vegetables and fruits and that's an that's an uneven playing field that's very significant so I'm convinced that my food Giants would increase the amount of money they put into Research into science to make vegetables more attractive more tasty fresher more longlasting if you will on the Shelf um and um and then also I'm convinced that they would sort of fiddle around with the grocery store and they ran across these These Guys in New Mexico practicing nudge marketing they were going into supermarkets and fiddling with the grocery cart and they did some experiments where they in fact um these these um one of these one of these um scientists came out of the Cornell Food Lab actually um Colin Payne and um did an experiment where he put some duct tape down the middle of a grocery cart and a sign in the front saying put your vegetables in the front half of the shopping cart and that little nudge led to a doubling in produce sales in the grocery stores where they did this experiments but he also was playing around when I caught up with him by putting with putting mirrors in the front of the cart cuz the idea is when you walk into the grocery store everything about it is designed to sort of get you off your game plan and make spontaneous purchase decisions and to kind of forget about who you are so his idea was if we could remind people of who they were as they're shopping in the store they'll reconnect kind of with the consequences of those purchase decisions and remember the reality outside the store instead what you get is this law law music and and bright colors and so again of this law law atmosphere so he's starting picturing and I love this one because this is a this photo is reflecting the image of the person uh pushing the cart he was in Al Paso and and the mirror that they had come up with was was was sort of um was rectangular and he had suggested turning it this way so he would get the image of this part of his body because he had a very uh substantial stomach but the real biggest thing I think that the food joints would do to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables would be to turn to their tried and true friends on Madison Avenue and find those emotional buttons to push that could drive consumption of vegetables like they drive consumption of Snickers bars and what have you um so it took a while but I managed to find an advertising firm to do an ad campaign for me um uh for a vegetable and and and not any vegetable but I settled on a vegetable that tends to tends to cause issues for a good number of people especially of my generation if they had parents who cooked it to Mush and then made you and then made you eat it and not only that but this advertising agency agreed to do this campaign and let me watch them do it and videotape it and it was like being inside a Mad Men and woman segment where they're where they're doing their sort of Genius thing and so I'm going to show you a couple of Snippets of the of the video that we made of their process trying to come up with this um this campaign for the problem vegetable I do not like broccoli and I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it and I'm president of the United States and I'm not going to eat any I hope you remember that guy well health brocc is not a popular vegetable it was dered by President George Bush and it's pretty much ignored by the rest of us I'm Michael moss and I WR about the intersection of food and marketing for New York time I'm trying to answer a question it take to get people better advertising whose previous clients includ T generals and cocacola took on the challenge pro bono okay and about halfway through the process um and this went on for weeks and weeks I mean these are people who can turn around and ad for Porsche in like a couple of days but they were pulling their hair out and and because this was like a real challenge I mean it's one thing to sell junkie stuff or speed or sex to people but broccoli but at one point they decided okay look Michael you're not giving us any money but even in the real world we probably wouldn't have money for prime time TV we got to like start slowly here let's let's do some social media campaigns stuff and let's we're going to pick a fight with another product in the grocery store and I thought oh boy they're going to go after you know one of my favorites potato chips or maybe they're going to go after french fries in the restaur restaurant and they go no no no no no you're forgetting your own book remember how you wrote about how the supposed war between Pepsi and cocacola was like a bloody war and in fact it was totally bloodless because those two companies figured out that every time they attacked each other or every time Pepsi got Michael Jackson to come up with a new ad the sales of both companies would rise because it brought Buzz to the soda aisle and so they decided to pick a fight with somebody else in the grocery store and this is a video snippet of these mad men and women actually at work sitting around the table trying to come up with this with this uh campaign strategy so our key consumer inut that we're working with is that everyone is currently talking about chaos um it is everywhere this is bone Appetit magazine there's a whole section on the vegetable revolution in here and there's a timeline around when all of these vegetables had their it moments broccoli is not on the SL there's nothing new or exciting to say about broccoli our challenge is going to be how to change the visual communication the visual style of broccoli in culture that wall over there broccoli cool maybe be cool not cool you don't want to D anyone but maybe you know maybe there joke I mean the fact that BR is having it own campaign I think you can have a lot of fun with so you Rec like I like you to live longer here's something that's going to do that probably a better GI than so that drops out at the end but he said is it a bro okay so this is how these you know advertising people you know get their juices up by sitting around thinking of silly things like that but in fact they came up with a campaign um I came up with a story this is it landed on the cover of the New York Times magazine and I'm still I'm still kind of amazed that the New York Times editors put it on in the magazine not to mention on the cover because it was entirely fictitious there was no campaign there was no broccoli grower that was buying this advertising for their product but we did it and this is one of the ad Strate and boy did I hear it from the kale people right and I'm still hearing it from the kale people but they were having fun and that was that was the first lesson that they learn themselves and they relate to me which is the last thing in the world we're going to do is preach about broccoli because the government has been preaching about broccoli to us for years and years and sales haven't increased we're going to have fun and we're going to recreate broccoli image to Consumers um but then something really interesting happened some students at another College I won't mention but it happens to be in New Haven one of the one of the biggest food deserts in the country right a university surrounded by fairly poor people without a lot of shopping options decided to take the campaign advertising that Victors and spoils did and create real Billboards and real signs and they managed to double broccoli sales in New Haven with their real Hands-On strategy um one of the the rather largest broccoli grower on the East Coast adopted the alpha vegetable strategy that Victors and spoils came up with having seen that broccoli was a bit of a wall flow are timid they decided to make it big and bold and dramatic and indeed thanks to Thomas this is one of their broccoli boxes and you can go to their website and see a whole bunch of other sort of advertising strategy they're using and then um the Obama let's move campaign people got the the um protest Association folks um interested in doing something even more dramatic powerful which was engaging some of our celebrities who endorse the junkiest food products out there to turn around and lend their good name and good faces um to things like broccoli and um and in this case um in this case Citrus um and um um and it's taking off uh the produce Association is actually now doing two experimental programs in two cities where they're trying to measure um the ability of this kind of advertising campaign to um to increase sales and I think that I'm hoping that if that data is as strong it as is they'll be able to convince the produce Growers themselves to start coughing up money for marketing again look there's no there's no way that SK that that spinach is ever going to be able to compete with Skittle for that reward center of our brain but they don't really have to match it just get close to it to have some dramatic impact in the grocery store where other things can happen too none other than Walmart I um I Heard the other day in some of its stores in West Virginia were rejiggering the physical layout of grocery stores to increase the presence of vegetables and I'll show you a little segment of of this so what happens when three West Virginia Walmarts decide to take the cyan chicks out of one checkout out for store and replace them with fruit and other healthy items that's all I'm going to show you because the answer is they increase sales and it was working because a checkout counter is actually one of the most dangerous places in The Shopper if you're thinking about health because the stores know that that's when your guard is down and you're much more apt to impulse buy and so that's why the soda company started planting um refrigerators there with sodas that you could buy at the last moment um which brings me to this incredible sort of moment we're in now where we have this huge number of startup companies run in some cases by people from Silicon Valley other cases food a people like here at Cornell who are trying to to use that awful word disrupt or reinvent sort of all segments of the grocery store and it's it's really sort of fun watching them try to do their their thing um some of them are coming up with products like this which is soilent the drink right but others are coming up with um really interesting things like this sort of reformulating a ketchup to substitute all the add added sugar with like real vegetables instead and in this case the guys who invented that are a couple of military veterans from the Iraq War um and the stuff actually tastes really good um but one of the things that I'm most excited about is a number of the people I wrote about in the book who brought us things like the Lunchables and cocacola and Rice Krispy treat cereal have now switched s Ides having having some considerable misgiving about their life work and they are now helping some of the startups scale up by lending some of their hardcore formulation and marketing strategy to these new companies so Jeffrey Dunn of cocacola Fame Right started putting baby carrots in vending machines and using advertising like the broccoli campaign to make baby carrots fun Ed Martin the guy who invented the Rice Krispies treat cereal for Kelloggs is all excited about these things which are cargo containers you can plop into any food desert these were actually started to be used by pot growers but he's got the idea of using them for lettu usce throw little solar panels on the the roof and you have instant year round accessible and hopefully um affordable greens um and then there's um then there's Sarah Britto from the victors and spoils um broccoli campaign who you saw um Sarah is pictured um here I'm backing up sorry um here is Sarah Sarah uh worked for craft and one of her one of her biggest hits was figuring out how to increase sales of mac and cheese and and as Sarah tells us she was surveying neighborhoods I think it was in Denver and she walked into one family's house and they were sitting around talking and and she said um she said to them kind of confiding that hey we were just at your neighbors and they were telling us how much they loved craft mac and cheese and this light bulb went on and the people she was talking to and they said really and that's when Sarah sort of understood that they could Market this as this shared secret among consumers and so she came up with this campaign you know you love it well Sarah is now working for a group called The Chef's Collective bunch of people in the restaurant industry cooks and what have you who are trying to in reinvent restaurant menus um and the foods and in restaurants to make them just as delicious but healthier for people a really Tre is part of the um of the of of our food chain right now in terms of changing people's habits and then there's Bob dra inventor of the uh before spoken luncha balls um he has started advising a young man named Luke Saunders who is trying to disrupt what of the more difficult Andor treacherous parts of the food system in this country the vending machine Luke by the way was a was an was a me was a industrial oil salesman working in the midwest when he went into a food factory that was making frozen crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Luke said what parent would serve these to their kids and the and the manager said it's not parents the schools are buying this because they no longer have kitchens to cook real food and Luke just kind of goes God there's got to be like a better way to do some of this food stuff Luke came up with the farmers fridge salad vending machine which is actually working it's fresh salad it's affordable he's got 30 or 100 of these in the Chicago area now poor people wealthier people are buying them and Bob drain is helping him sort of rethink the marketing Strate strategy um for the farmer fridge and it's a little scary because because drain is about you know things like captive audiences and and he goes to Luke you know look you're putting these at 711s but but people drive to the 7-Eleven and that means they can drive down the street to Burger King you're not you're you're going to lose a lot of those people why don't you park these things in like a big office building where you have a captive audience a targeted captive audience and it's the it's this hardcore expression that maybe maybe a little scary for food startup people who aren't used to thinking about their lovely product in in in that fashion um this by the way is the original strategic marketing for for lunchable that that that made it so focused and so cunning and Bob is trying to help Luke come up with a sort of similar marketing strategy for the for the Lunchables um and who knows I mean eventually I think that going back to Nestle that if you could use the tried and true food industry methods of lowering cost increasing convenience um and increasing demand um that you'll not just get more produce sales in the produce style I think you'll get the food Giants themselves more keen on using more vegetables um Andor fruits in their products throughout the grocery store store so you don't even have to do the Walmart thing and put bananas at the checkout counter you can have the essence of those bananas in food products where you don't anymore today and all the the lovely nutritional value of of that um of course there's always the food Giants and they are trying their best now to reinvent their products too this was a recent tasting in um in Williamsburg Brooklyn where Kelloggs had a stand where they were adding things like pork fat to Rice Krispies Cereal which was sort of their way of trying to reinvent their products and who knows they may succeed in some ways maybe this maybe that or maybe they'll just go back to this sort of tried and true method too but I think that with a little bit of help from the food Giants and their marketing strategies a lot of these startups themselves can really start scaling up and make a really big difference in um our eating habits and and public health as a result of that and lastly I always forget that but uh this rather but as I work on the next book I'm is still out there engaging with people and tweeting through this address so if any of you want to keep in touch uh with me on that um on on that scale I'd be glad to and that's all I have thank you so much for listen sure if we have time absolutely yeah but the other beautiful thing about about fruits and vegetables is you can do some processing you can freeze for example I mean one of my favorite things to buy this time of year frozen blueberries which if frozen correctly can actually make a lot more ethical moral sense Health sense than trying to buy fresh blueberries imported from who knows where so I think there's actually a lot of cunning processing that the industry could do and look look I mean processing is not necessarily an evil word word and and and certainly I'm not about about being anti-all food processing otherwise I wouldn't be eating my favorite cheeses for example um it's about it's about controlling process foods rather than letting them control us and I think that that knowing as the Food Industries know that more and more people are caring about what they put in their bodies and they're they're starting to make p purchase decisions based on that I I think they'll understand that they can't they can't ruin those things and they may be able to incorporate them into into into products you know where people need some convenience in their in their lives yeah the the good news is that I think in many other countries including France there's sort of more mindfulness about food and and I and I know that the folks at the food lab here at Cornell has really paid close attention to that issue of mindfulness because it does seem to be does seem like there was this moment in the 1980s when suddenly overnight we became mindless about food and and it became socially acceptable to eat anything anywhere any time and that's when you started people see people walk down the street and eating and drinking and bringing food into business meetings and if I open up a bag of chips right now and had Naki probably wouldn't be that shocked and that played right into the hands of the food companies and making us less mindful about them and so they started to engineer products you could eat with one hand and didn't need utensils while you were doing something something else and that led to snacking becoming this fourth American meal I mean in France still people think we're crazy to I mean why would you want to ruin your appetite before having a meal where you were going to sit down with friends and family and linger for a couple of hours enjoying kind of the sociability as well as the food itself it's changing though but because American processed foods are starting to spread around the world not just to Saudi Arabia or Brazil where I showed Nestle's boat but in Europe as well and so you're seeing increasing obesity and diabetes and in in in lots of the developed world as well um uh where the convenience and the Allure of processed foods and or kind of the craziness of their lives is is is is making them more dependent on American style process food all right um yeah I think potentially but but um and you know I used to I used to really I used to really hate the idea of the soda tax um as being regressive and hurting poor people who you know who who um you know who who who are paying the tax but but I've sort of come around on that but but it's funny because I I I put that question to Jeff Bible the former CEO Philip Morris um and in his Australian accent which I can't mimic he said to me you know Michael look I'm no fan of government but but when it comes to food I mean you have to remember these food companies are so viciously competitive for space on the grocery shelf and and people are becoming so concerned about food these days that I think it could actually behoove the food companies to to take it upon themselves actually to suggest some regulation relating to nutrition if only to sort of give them cover from Wall Street because they're all under tremendous pressure to produce profits and that pressure is has just increased year after year after year and that was sort of Jeff Bible's sense was it would be in the industry's own interest to sort of reach out but I don't think they're going to accept it coming the other way and I think there's just this inherent resistance to to having government intervention especially if it doesn't make any sense to the the food companies I'd much rather see the change come from the food companies themselves finding ways to continue making money um uh with healthier products and and I think they're starting they're starting to try with that let's go try some food great thank you this has been a production of Cornell University on the web at cornell.edu

Channel: Cornell SIPS

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Id: BEEiHk_31xw

Length: 57min 53sec (3473 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2016