Tips from the Processed Food Industry – Takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

SKIP TO: Key Takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat

SKIP TO: Action Items for Parents

Buy Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss HERE.

Anyone who buys food in a grocery store, even if (you think) it is healthy. This book gives such a great perspective on how food companies think about food: minimizing the cost of inputs, tracking consumer needs and inventing products to fill those needs, increasing the attractiveness of products based on consumer demands via clever marketing, staying competitive with other companies, etc. It presents an entirely different way of thinking about food.

I had four primary takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat. First, there is a real consumer need for convenience given today’s lifestyle. Second, there are many challenges inherent to mass-producing tasty food. Third, the competitive marketplace naturally limits a company’s ability to make food healthier. Finally, the food industry is setting up expectations for our children about what food should taste like, whether we like it or not.

Over the last 100 years, American culture has undergone a massive transformation as women leapt into the workforce and out of the home. But women weren’t doing nothing when they stayed home. They were often taking care of kids and preparing meals (whether enthusiastically or sullenly). As early as 1955, nearly 38 percent of American women had joined the workforce. Joining the workforce meant running out the front door in the morning and rushing back home in the evening to take care of the family. The processed food industry was quick to spot the need for convenient family foods given the compressed time at home.

How we adopted processed foods

To encourage widespread adoption of processed foods, companies convinced a culture that valued home cooking to outsource its meal prep. To do so, they took several steps to approach working women in the 1950s. First, they employed a team of home economics teachers, who dressed fashionably, held cooking contests and classes for moms and daughters, and set up demonstration kitchens all over the country. Second, they ingratiated themselves with the American Home Economics Association by making grants and creating fellowship programs. This generated goodwill and enabled them to advertise in the Association’s publications and fairs. As a result, the home economics curriculum slowly changed from home management and cooking skills to consumer education. Finally, for a personal touch, the companies created the relatable, fictional Betty Crocker. Betty Crocker advertised the time-saving nature of company products and responded personally to up to 5,000 fans a day.

Today, we need fast, convenient food to support our busy, work-oriented lifestyle. Most of us don’t have a parent at home to manage a household and everyone’s meals. Even those parents who do stay home are more actively parenting than tended to be the case in prior generations. As a result, parents are crunched for time, especially when it comes to making meals. We have therefore agreed to the food industry’s proposal to out-source a significant portion of our meal prep.

Why it matters

I had two primary takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat regarding this convenience point.

First, there is a real need for quick and convenient meals. Any proposed solution to eating lots of processed food needs to address that reality.

The second of my takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat is the key misalignment of industry and customer interests. The book highlights how, by necessity, a company’s priority is to survive and thrive in a competitive marketplace. This means that its products must be perceived as healthy to the extent that consumers dictate this requirement. But who at the end of the day is checking to ensure consumer expectations match the product’s reality? The effects of unhealthy choices may take years to manifest.

It occurred to me as I read how uniquely vulnerable parents are due to their compressed time. I think we all want to feed our children healthy food. But parents often don’t have time to check whether foods marketed as “healthy” actually meet this standard. Parents don’t have time to research each mysterious ingredient that appears on an ingredient label. They don’t have a lot of training in what nutrients to prioritize or avoid for kids. Today we have so many options at the grocery store. Crucially, much about these options is opaque because the average parent doesn’t have the knowledge base necessary to make well-reasoned choices about what is good for kids based on nutrition labels.

My conclusion therefore is that parents should approach all processed foods with great suspicion given the knowledge gap and the misaligned incentives at play.

Even with plentiful time, shoppers may not have all of the information necessary to understand if a food is healthy. Ingredient labels are easy to manipulate. (For example, sugar may be listed several times on the label, broken down into several different types of sugar, which has the simultaneous benefit of knocking it down from the first spot on the ingredient list, which customers know is reserved for the most plentiful ingredient, and of appearing under less conspicuous names). Additionally, ingredient labels do not include key information about what may have been removed from a food. For example “fruit juice concentrate” has good connotations but may be virtually indistinguishable from sugar.  

There are two dark-horse challenges that the food industry faces in producing healthy food. I call them dark horses because I don’t think they register in the average consumer’s mind. First, the difficulties inherent in mass-producing food. Second (discussed in Takeaway #3 below), a company’s constant contest to stay afloat amidst fierce industry competition.

The first challenge that the food industry faces is the technological one of mass-producing tasty and shelf-stable foods. Additives may enhance or create a good flavor, mask an undesirable flavor, facilitate processing, or maintain a food’s safety and to enable a long shelf-life.

Altering flavors

Foods processed on an industrial scale are different from foods that a home cook puts together in the kitchen. Home cooks, for example, can select the best tomatoes for a delicious tomato sauce. The food industry, by contrast, will be interested in how sturdy the tomatoes are for shipment to the processing facility. It will care how long the tomatoes last on arrival and how expensive the tomatoes are (down to the fraction of a penny). It will consider whether they can improve the flavor via the addition of sugar, salt, and other less-expensive ingredients to approximate the taste of good tomatoes.

If the food industry responds to consumer pressure to re-formulate a product to reduce one of the elements of the salt, sugar, or fat triad, the other two elements often silently tick up. The problem is that the salt, sugar, and fat was added in the first place for a reason. Typically, the reason is to alter a flavor or mask an unpleasant taste resulting from processing.

For instance, reheated processed meats can have a damp-dog-hair flavor due to the oxidation of fats. People are very sensitive to this flavor and can detect it at low levels. Salt hides the flavor very well and very inexpensively. This is one reason that these processed foods containing meat are often so high in salt. If the industry lowers the salt level, it must find another way to mask the undesirable flavor. This may mean elevating other additives or using a salt alternative.

Salt also changes the texture of processed meat, which can otherwise be rubbery. It makes sugar taste sweeter, adds crunch to crackers and baked goods, and masks bitter or dull tastes (common in processed foods). Moss notes that commercial white bread prepared without salt tasted “like tin,” lost its soft texture, and was missing the classic brown crust. Meanwhile, Kellog’s cornflakes tasted metallic. Cheez-Its became sickly yellow and developed a gummy texture.

Facilitating processing

To facilitate processing in the factory, companies often add certain ingredients. For example, salt keeps commercial bread-making machinery from gumming up during the breadmaking process. It also slows down the dough’s rise, enabling ovens to keep pace with the bread making. Even the salt itself may have additives. “Shur-Flo Fine Flour Salt” includes three additives to prevent factory dust and ensure smooth and consistent flow of salt through machinery.

Enabling a long shelf-life

Processed food must reach the hands of the consumer in good shape and be able to sit on a shelf for some time. Some ingredients are added for this purpose.

When General Foods decided to start adding fructose to Kool-Aid, they had a problem. Any exposure to moisture would cause the fructose to turn into a brick (similar to what happens with brown sugar). So they needed an additive to prevent it from caking. Further, they needed a method to prevent it from caking until the additives themselves could be added. The solution: a giant diaper on the outside of the storage silos until the company could mix a combination of calcium citrate, tricalcium phosphate, and silicon dioxide into the fructose.

Fructose itself is an ingredient in yogurt, ice cream, cookies, and breads because it resists forming crystals, which keeps soft foods (like cookies) from hardening while sitting on the shelf. It also resists decomposition – making it very effective for foods with long shelf lives. Finally, it blocks the formation of ice when frozen, making it ideal for ice cream.

The big picture takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat about additives

First, if a food says it has reduced sugar, salt, or fat, look closely at the ingredient label. Check if the other two elements of the triad have ticked up and check for new additives. There is a reason the reduced ingredient was high in the first place. The company still must address the underlying technical problem – just in a different way. Other elements of the triad may be higher, or the food may include an alternative chemical (with its own health implications). The alternative may not be as well understood, or it may simply not be currently in the spotlight.

Second, many ingredients serve to ease the process of mass producing food and to enable storage. The ingredients represent a departure from how we have historically eaten. My mindset has always been that one ought to approach radical changes slowly and with great caution. Based on this book, I’m not sure we have done so.

The essence of my takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat on additives is that we are eating a lot of ingredients we would not otherwise eat, without realizing we are doing so, and without understanding what the long term effects may be. This was a relatively sudden and recent change in how we live, so we may still be understanding the full implications of the change.

The second challenge companies face is to survive industry competition. Food companies may want to produce more nutritious food, but they do not exist in isolation. They are in a constant fight for survival. If a competitor gets an edge, employees are fired or laid off, and investors look for someone to blame for the poor return on investment. This model impacts how healthy food can get because, as one industry executive noted, “The right product for consumers would probably have no sugar and no fat, but then you’d have no sales.”

The recently released Netflix comedy “Unfrosted” showcased this competition. The movie depicts the development of the Pop-Tart and the struggle between Kellogs and Post. I’m just going to come out and say it was a terrible movie. I could only stand to watch the first 45 minutes or so before I couldn’t take any more. In part, the movie was so irritating because it portrays a highly sophisticated industry as comprised of clueless buffoons.

They were not clueless in the slightest. To develop products, these companies relied on a rigorous and organized process. They combine studies, extensive consumer tests, and complex mathematical models to analyze the data and determine precisely how best to formulate their products to maximize sales. They gleaned how best to segment their customer bases, based on particular preferences, so as to generate the most sales possible. And they were very clever at marketing. Consider how the Lunchable was presented in a wrapping meant to evoke the feeling that a working mom, laden with mom-guilt, was presenting her child with a gift.

They may also turn to Monell Chemical Senses Center, funded with a combination of taxpayer money and food industry grants. Monell is a research facility where physiologists, chemists, neuroscientists, biologists, and geneticists to understand smell, taste, and our desire for food. Making grants gives the food industry early access to research findings and the ability to engage scientists to conduct special studies. For example, it was researchers at Monell who established that babies are born liking sweet tastes when the industry came under attach for copious use of sugar in kids’ food.

Just add sugar!

When it comes to developing products, these companies don’t leave anything to chance. For sugar, for instance, they invest in finding the optimal level of sweetness (the “bliss point”) to ensure maximal sensory pleasure, because “companies are not going to sell as much ketchup, Go-Gurt, or loaves of bread if they’re not sweet enough. Or, put a different way, they will sell a lot more much ketchup, Go-Gurt, and loaves of bread if they can determine the precise bliss point in each of those items.”

Approaching health-conscious consumers

Consumers caught on to the amount of sugar in foods and how companies were targeting kids using sugar. In 1977, two hundred decayed children’s teeth arrived at the Federal Trade Commission. They were a gift from health professionals and consumer groups lobbying to limit the advertising of sugary foods on kids television programming. The effort brought into the spotlight how advertisements were teaching, for example, that breakfast is “no fun” without a sugary cereal, that fruit-flavored cookies are preferable to fresh fruit, and that eating sugar is a desirable, fun, and normal way that happy and healthy children satisfy hunger.

The Federal Trade Commission’s fixation on advertising to kids wrapped up in 1980. However, consumer groups and journalists kept sugar content part of the public conversation. In response, cereal companies changed their marketing strategies and revised names. For example, “Sugar Frosted Flakes” became “Frosted Flakes”. But, far more deviously, they took steps to market to those customers who specifically wanted healthier foods for their children. Fort his, they used a variety of strategies, such as swapping out ingredients, manipulating ingredients, and simple clever marketing.

Swapping out ingredients

In the 1980s, pure fructose became available on the commercial market. Table sugar is 50% fructose, and 50% glucose. The fructose is more than twice as sweet as the glucose and nearly twice as sweet as table sugar. Using fructose in food provided two benefits. First, products needed less sweetener to achieve the same level of sweetness (lower production costs). Second, companies could advertise a product as having less sugar.

But does less sugar via more fructose actually translate into healthier food, as consumers may assume of a lower-sugar product? This opens up a key issue in the food industry. The product marketing can simply state an accurate fact that implies the product is healthier. And, if an ingredient isn’t clearly poisonous or linked to an immediate health risk, there appears to be little to limit a company’s ability to add it to the food or market it this way. Who’s to say that the food industry can’t add fructose to food, when it naturally occurs in fruit?

Salt Sugar Fat cites a 2011 study suggesting that consuming beverages high in fructose (as opposed to those high in just glucose) may cause an increase in markers for heart disease. Asked about this study, Kraft said that regulators consider fructose to be safe, that it would monitor the research, and that it would respond to any regulatory changes. This makes sense. Why would they dig into this type of research which is unlikely to be beneficial to marketing or sales? The company only needs to say that a product has less sugar, which is accurate. Let consumers jump to their own conclusions regarding the health implications of those facts.

Manipulating ingredients

Even better than fructose (from a marketing perspective) was the development of fruit juice concentrate. To make fruit juice concentrate, they extract juice from grapes and pears and evaporate the water. The end result is stripped of fiber and vitamins and nearly identical to sugar. However, any product containing this fruit juice concentrate can be marketed as having “real fruit.” Take for example Wild Cherry Capri-Sun, with more sugar than soda and yet advertised as “all natural.”

Clever marketing

There are also methods that don’t necessarily require the reformulation of products. Philip Morris, which owned Kraft, produced an internal strategy paper called “Lessons from the Tobacco Wars.” The paper noted that the company should not argue with the consumer. Rather, “Respond to the customer’s need and belief. Our business lies in public acceptance.”

Kraft took this advice to heart when sales of Oreos dropped. Apparently, some Oreo fans were avoiding the cookie aisle altogether, too afraid they would emerge with a package of cookies and run home to binge. Kraft needed to find a way to pull consumers back down the cookie aisle. In 2003, they produced the 100-calorie pack. This pack was deliberately created to give consumers a sense of control and empowerment over their sweet treats, enticing them back down the cookie aisle. And it worked! Sales took off in both the 100-calorie packs and in the original Oreos.

Why it matters

Overall, one of my most important takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat is the adjustment in perspective that the book provides. Maybe I have been particularly innocent. When I see food marketed with connotations of healthiness, I tend think of the product as in fact something the company tried to make healthier. But I should be aware of myself as a “health conscious” consumer segment to whom the advertisement is directed. There may be healthier elements in the food – but health is not the company’s overarching goal. My believing that the item is healthier and making the purchase is the goal.

Lessons about sugar

There are three primary reasons why children are drawn to sweet tastes. First, in nature, sweetness is a signal that a food is energy-dense, and children need lots of energy to grow. Second, it is exciting for our bodies, because in nature it was rare to find a very sweet food. Third, it makes children feel good. It literally reduces pain (reduces crying in babies, children are able to keep a hand in a cold bucket for a longer period, and it eases the pain of withdrawal in opiate addicts).

Salt Sugar Fat cites a presentation given by researchers at Monell describing children’s taste preferences. Whereas the taste for salt doesn’t develop until four or five months, the taste for sweet appears to be in place from the moment a child is born. A child’s “bliss point” for sweetness (point at which the food is most enjoyable) – is much higher than an adult’s. However, children also consume more sugar. For this reason, some researchers think that the amount of sugar children consume may be increasing their bliss points.

If it is the case, as some researchers believe, that the bliss point is shaped by early experiences, this gives companies (and parents!) an opportunity to influence how a child’s preference for sugar evolves. The risk here is that processed food companies, unchecked, may teach children to develop a preference for ever-sweeter food, exploiting the biology of children who are naturally drawn to sweet foods.

As an aside, one thing that surprised me was that researchers at Monell can measure a child’s bliss point. Apparently, that bliss point will match the sugar content of the child’s preferred cereal!

Possible addictive characteristics

Parents should also note that sugar has an addictive effect. It activates the reward centers in the brain to generate intense feelings of pleasure. It does so to the extent that some scientists see certain foods as potentially addictive. Rodents clearly exhibit addictive symptoms when it comes to sugar. For example, they will compulsively overeat sugary foods and will continue to eat cheesecake even while receiving an electric shock. (They do not do this for non-sugary foods). Their teeth will chatter when the sugary foods are withdrawn. Also interesting: human test subjects given naloxone (which counters the effects of opiates) demonstrated a reduced craving for sugar.

Lessons about salt

In 2012, researchers at Monell published a study focused on how children develop a taste for salt. They split 61 children into two groups: one group that ate a normal diet (the “salty kids”), and one that was given baby food that was very low in salt (the “unsalted kids”). The researchers tested the children at two months and again at six months of age by offering them solutions of varying saltiness. At two months, none of the kids showed a preference for salt, but by six months, the salty kids preferred the salty solution, whereas the unsalted kids preferred plain water. Over time, the salty kids developed an even stronger preference for salt. The study showed that the preference for salt was a learned preference, not an innate one.

Fortunately, it appears the preference can be unlearned. In 1982, Monell confirmed that after twelve weeks, those eating a reduced salt diet regained their sensitivity to salt. Together, these two pieces of research seem to show that parents have quite a bit of control in hooking and unhooking their kids from salt.

Lessons about fat

A number of processed foods that people don’t consider to be particularly fatty are in fact very high fat. A good example is candy bars. The point here is that we are quite bad at determining how fatty a particular food is when the fat is not visually apparent. For example, taste testers given different formulas of frosting where the sugar and fat content vary are quite accurate in estimating the sugar content, but quite bad at estimating the fat content.

In the processed food industry, fat masks certain flavors by coating the tongue to keep taste buds from getting too large an impression of a taste immediately. It simultaneously delivers other flavors. This characteristic makes it a common addition to processed foods. It also helps the food industry that the bliss point for fat is very high or potentially non-existent – meaning there is no point at which the fat level is so high that we find a food unappealing.

My takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat here are that kids may be getting a lot of calories from fat in a food without realizing it – they need to be taught to check whether a food is fatty and the type of fat. This further means that if a child is perhaps eating too many calories, reducing fat content may be a relatively painless way to cut calories (at least in meals where the fat is not working hard to disguise flavors developed over the course of food processing).

Below are my personal three actionable parenting takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat.

Babies may be born liking sweet foods, but they are still learning what to expect from foods and what they should taste like. If they regularly drink sweet beverages (e.g., soda), they may learn to expect drinks to be sweet. Some researchers in this area believe that regular exposure to sugary drinks moves the sugar “bliss point” higher than it might otherwise be, even in foods other than drinks.

On the other hand, babies have to learn to like salt, and they typically do not develop a taste for salt until sometime between 4 and 6 months.  Fortunately, sensitivity to salt is reversible if one simply cuts down on salt for a period of time.

My practical takeaway from Salt Sugar Fat then is to think twice before giving kids sweet or salty foods regularly. This is the case even if I’m not worried about the health risks of the particular food. The concern is not the food that the child is eating in itself – it is the lesson that food should taste a particular way. To use a metaphor, if we are teaching our children how to fish, we must teach them which fish are the good ones. We should teach them to enjoy eating the good fish.

As an aside, this gives another reason to be skeptical of alternative sweeteners that claim to be healthier than sugar. The point is to teach children to enjoy the taste of healthy foods – not to pass along the lesson that foods should be sweet.

Of course, this doesn’t rule out giving kids treats here and there!.

When Oscar Mayer rolled out its idea for a pizza version of Lunchables, they started product tests with moms. Moms found the idea of cold, raw pizza revolting, and told Oscar Mayer that this was a terrible idea. However, kids loved the idea. The book notes that this epitomizes the difference between how adults and children approach food: adults focus on the taste of foods in their mouths (and noses) – but children tend to use their eyes and judge it by how it looks. Pizza Lunchables, which kids could assemble themselves, looked fun. In addition, Lunchables in general were so popular because kids loved the idea of being able to assemble their lunches how they chose – giving kids a sense of independence and empowerment. Thus the slogan, “All day you gotta do what they say, but lunchtime is all yours.”

My takeaway from Salt Sugar Fat here is to aim to see foods through the lens of my kids. They aren’t going to be as convinced by the “just give it a taste, it might surprise you how much you like it” approach.

Instead, I should embrace some of the aspects of food that naturally draw them in. Does it look like fun? Give them a sense of control or excitement? Look enticing? (Deliberately the last question.) This may already be instinctive for most parents. I tried this with my son the other night with broccoli, making it look like a tiny tree and pretending to be a dinosaur wanting to eat the top off of it. I asked him if he wanted to join me in chomping the trees – and five pieces of broccoli later, I was thrilled. Of course, he was only eating the tops, but small steps! A win for making the food into an exciting activity.

It should be clear by this point that the food industry has a number of pressures to juggle. The health of the consumer is only one metric. Parents should keep this in mind. The company never just wants to make healthy food. If you want to buy something healthy, consider that they are pitching products with a target health-conscious buyer in mind, and the healthy product is responding to this specific, identified market opportunity. They need to convince you, the target buyer, that the product checks the healthy box. Likely, there are certain metrics you’re focused on at the moment (seed oils? anti-inflammatory? whole grain?) and they’re giving buzz words to imply health. But the product may not in fact tick the healthy box.

As noted above, one of the major takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat is that the industry uses a number of tricks to persuade customers to purchase their products. A product marketed as healthy is not necessarily healthy – there is a lot of information busy customers don’t have, even if you review the ingredient label.

Acknowledging that I may not have all the necessary information to evaluate a product, I’ve tried using a third party reviewer to review product ingredients in order to make better purchases – for example, the Environmental Working Group has a Healthy Living App which makes it relatively easy to look up products and get a quick review of concerning ingredients and concerns.

But I suppose my takeaway here is just to be very skeptical any time I am buying processed foods — and to avoid them whenever possible.

I loved this book. It was like taking a walk back through the 90s. Remember the Lunchables craze? Frosted Mini Wheats ? (This was one of the few sweet cereals I was allowed to eat growing up.) Capri Sun, made with 100% real juice? This book takes the reader through many of these products from the business perspective. It touches on how and why a product was developed in the first place. Then it explores how companies refined or expanded the product into new product lines based on the consumer response.

Among my major takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat are the many challenges processed food companies face. They include keeping a food shelf-stable, hiding poor tastes that develop over the course of processing, responding to consumer concerns about health, facing extinction if unable to compete with other (potentially less scrupulous) brands, encouraging return purchases, and answering to investors.

The downside of this book: it will leave you skeptical about buying anything processed, including food that is supposedly healthy. But maybe this is a good thing?

Disclaimer: This is part of a series of practical takeaways on books that influence how I parent. My parenting takeaways from Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss are my own interpretations. They may not reflect the author’s views. If you want to read more in-depth on the topic, I encourage you to buy the book.

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