Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

when he pointed to the top of the upside-down U and said, “That’s your bliss point.”
    “And I said, ‘That’s a great name,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “It’s just so sexy. What are you going to call it, the ‘optimum sensory liking’?”
    I t wasn’t until the early 1980s that Moskowitz became a full-fledged industry star. By that time, he had married, and struggling to raise a family on his Army salary, he moved to White Plains, about twenty-five miles north of New York City. White Plains had become a magnet for some of the largest processed food manufacturers in the country, and shortly after arriving, Moskowitz started his own consulting business. The food giants were facing some of the toughest years in their history, transitioning from an era of smugness—in which almost everything they invented, from HamburgerHelper to Pringles, was a surefire hit—to getting called on the carpet regularly for lackluster sales by their ultimate master: Wall Street.
    The largest manufacturer of all, General Foods, had come to be seen as a plodding dinosaur that feared innovation and relied too heavily on old products, including coffee—which, at $2.5 billion, accounted for more than a quarter of its annual sales—and frozen vegetables.The company, plagued by bureaucracy, was notorious for moving slowly in response to marketplace trends. The thousand people who worked at its vast research and development operations on the banks of the Hudson River were churning out precious few hits. One financial analyst dubbed it“one of the great ho-hummers among giant food companies.” In 1985, General Foods got a new lease on life when the tobacco giant Philip Morris acquired it for $5.75 billion, but that only intensified the pressure on the beleaguered food side executives. The tobacco company wasn’t being philanthropic. Philip Morris wanted a return on that investment, and fires were soon lit within General Foods to get the profits up.
    Howard Moskowitz had already been working on projects for General Foods for a number of years, helping the company develop winning formulas for its cereals and Jell-O, when the company called on him in 1986 to help with a more pressing crisis.Maxwell House, their flagship coffee brand, was losing badly to Folgers, and the coffee managers were at a loss about how to turn the tide. The problem was not marketing. It was far worse than that. A string of taste tests showed that people simply liked Folgers better. Pressed by their new bosses at Philip Morris, the General Food executives knew there was only one way out: They needed a new formula. Whatever beans and roasting process the company was using, it wasn’t working. They needed to start over.
    Instead of making a few different roasts and submitting them to a new panel of tasters, Moskowitz pored over the data from the tests that had been done. In these, and in subsequent tests, he made a key observation. The data showed that people had varied preferences for coffee that could be grouped into three different roasts, weak, medium, and strong. Eachroast was considered equally perfect by their respective fans. This was a novel concept at the time. The American consumer was viewed as a singular target, uncomplicated by variation, and every food company making every grocery product was focused on finding the one perfect formulation. Moskowitz, in a bold stroke, convinced General Foods that it should be selling not one but all three of these roasts—a breakthrough that the executive in charge of fixing Maxwell House at the time, John Ruff, told me saved the brand. “We actually reversed a loss to a win against Folgers,” he said.
    If coffee had not one but three states of perfection, Moskowitz asked, what about the rest of the grocery store? Couldn’t the same principle apply there? He wasn’t envisioning the line extensions that companies later adopted to boost sales, using slight variations in color or taste or packaging to bring new