Free Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss

computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. “People say, ‘I crave chocolate,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods?”
    Conceptually, his technique is simple enough. Grocery products have lots of attributes that make them attractive, chief among them color, smell, packaging, and taste. In the craft called optimization, food engineers alter these variables ever so slightly in making dozens and dozens of new versions, each just a bit different from the next. These are not new products to sell. They are created with the sole intent of finding the most perfect variation, which is divined by putting all these experimental versions to the test. Ordinary consumers are paid to spend days sitting in rooms where they are presented with the many variations, which they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl, and most of all taste. Their opinions are logged and dumped into a computer, which is where Moskowitz’s training in high math comes in. The data is sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which determines what features in a product will be most attractive to consumers. Moskowitz likes to imagine that his computer is divided into silos, in which each of the attributes is stacked. But it’s not simply a matter of comparing color 23 to color 24. In the most complicated projects, color 23 must be compared with syrup 11 and packaging 6, and on and on. Even in jobs where the only concern is taste and the variables are limited to the ingredients, endless charts and graphs will come spewing out of his computer. “I mix and match ingredients by this experimentaldesign,” he told me. “The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create, so I can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach.”
    After four months of this work for Dr Pepper, in which he analyzed and then tested a slew of possible variations, Moskowitz and his team delivered the new Dr Pepper flavor. Dr Pepper, which for years had been trying to compete with Coke and Pepsi, finally had the hit it was looking for. It tasted of cherry and also of vanilla—hence the name, Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper—and it hit stores in 2004. It proved so successful that the parent company, Cadbury Schweppes, couldn’t resist selling the brand in 2008, along with Snapple and 7-Up. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group has since been valued in excess of $11 billion, a figure undoubtedly enhanced by Moskowitz’s labors.
    The Dr Pepper project was extraordinary in one other way. The company wasn’t looking for new customers as much as it was trying to get its existing customers to buy more of its product, without regard to whether it was the original flavor or the Cherry Vanilla. Thus, the Moskowitz team’s campaign was for nothing less than the hearts and minds of the most devoted Pepper fans.They devised sixty-one different formulations, varying the sugar flavorings ever so slightly with each incarnation. They rounded up tasters across the country, and sat them down to a series of 3,904 tastings. And once all that testing was done, Moskowitz then performed his high math, searching for the one thing the food industry covets more than anything else, the defining facet of consumer craving: the bliss point.
    I met Howard Moskowitz on a crisp day in the spring of 2010 at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan. He is a large man in every sense of the word, tall with sandy gray hair, and the club’s cushy chairs and refined breakfast menu suit him well. Moskowitz obtained his doctoral degree from Harvard in the late 1960s, adding a PhD in experimental psychology to his earlier focus in mathematics. In choosing a subject for his thesis, hisprofessors gave him a choice between political polling and human taste, and for Moskowitz, the decision was easy. “I was young and thin, and had grown