But that was easy compared to what consumers are demanding now. How about tastes like mango carrot, less filling - and made from natural ingredients without any chemical or genetically modified influences?
Think that's funny? Looked at a vodka or beer selection lately? To say nothing of breakfast cereal, yogurt, chicken wings and hamburger. And dont even get us started on pizza.
The reality is that merchants believe they have to offer consumers more variety to keep their business. And consumers, eying this cornucopia of choices are understandably forming the impression that they have every right to expect miracles.
The challenge is making the degree of choice economical, sensible and scientifically manageable. JL
Annie Gasparro and Jesse Newman report in the Wall Street Journal:
Technological advances that spawned multicolored breakfast cereals like Froot Loops and fat-free yogurt in flavors like red-velvet cupcake are colliding with burgeoning demand for more-natural food with simpler ingredients, which many consumers regard as healthier.
In the first 90 years of making its signature product, Campbell Soup Co. developed just over 100 varieties. In the past 30 years, that number has quadrupled, and now includes soups as diverse as Thai Tomato Coconut Bisque, Philly-Style Cheesesteak and Spicy Chicken Quesadilla.
The soup smorgasbord reflects Americans’ growing appetite for food with bold and exotic tastes and textures, which in recent decades has spurred companies to add thousands of new flavorings, spices, colorings, thickeners and preservatives to their recipes, shaking up the country’s menu.
Lately, however, the technological advances that spawned multicolored breakfast cereals like Froot Loops and fat-free yogurt in flavors like red-velvet cupcake are colliding with burgeoning demand for more-natural food with simpler ingredients, which many consumers regard as healthier.
Balancing these overlapping trends is proving tricky for the food industry, which is under pressure to find reliable, inexpensive natural sources of ingredients long synthesized in labs.
Consumers are “looking for some fun exploration in what they eat, and from a culinary and science side, it...sets the bar much higher,” says Craig Slavtcheff, Campbell’s vice president of science and technology. “The challenge is creating these bold flavors with real ingredients.”
In some cases that presents a major research-and-development puzzle, as well as the potential for higher costs, but the payoff can be big. For packaged-food companies, new tastes can spice up sales of established brands, even though consumer spending on food remains weak. That is why even simple condiments now come in dozens of varieties. H.J. Heinz Co., which made just one type of ketchup for 124 years, started adding new flavors in 2002. It now makes eight of them, including jalapeño-infused and balsamic-vinegar ketchups.How We Eat
To cook up such concoctions, food manufacturers frequently seek help from specialist firms called “flavor houses,” which often bear the R&D burden. (Learn about additives and where they can be found in the supermarket.)
“Rather than sourcing the jalapeño or poblano pepper, [some food makers] create it with a flavor house, and just apply it over a corn chip,” said Jared Simon, marketing director for Hain Celestial Group Inc. ’s snacks and bakery division. But, he said, Hain uses natural ingredients, such as real vegetables in its Terra vegetable chips.
Flavor houses not only tout the breadth of their offerings but their ability to produce them inexpensively and abundantly, without seasonal disruptions.
Synergy Flavors, an Illinois company that makes ingredients for ice cream, yogurt and other products, says its flavoring formulas currently number about 80,000, up sharply from around 13,000 in 2002. It has about 1,000 banana flavors alone, ranging from “green banana” to “banana foster.” On a recent afternoon, its employees wearing white lab coats were testing a French-toast flavoring for vanilla ice cream.
People have relied for millennia on salt and spices to flavor and preserve their food. But the use of modern chemistry to enhance food really took off during World War II, as the government sought to make meals tastier, less perishable and more nutritious for fighting men overseas.
The postwar food industry built on those innovations. Over the decades the business of producing synthetic flavors and other food additives boomed. The results were products such as bottled Ranch dressing with a shelf life of several months and Tang drink mix that tastes like oranges.
Many of these innovations came from flavor houses, which are expected to chalk up about $4 billion in revenue in the U.S. this year, up from $2.5 billion in 2003, according to consulting firm Leffingwell & Associates.
Flavor formulas are secrets, appearing on ingredient labels in vague terms like “natural and artificial flavors.” Congress in 1958 required the Food and Drug Administration to approve all food additives except for ingredients deemed “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. However, the law lets companies determine whether items are GRAS, except for food dyes.
In 1972, the FDA started letting companies seek official affirmation that their substances were GRAS. But with an explosion of new ingredients and a backlog of petitions, it moved to drop that process in 1997. Today, companies can notify the FDA about their GRAS ingredients, but many don’t bother.
So, there is no definitive tally of how many additives and other ingredients the U.S. food supply contains, though the Pew Charitable Trusts estimates the number at around 10,000.
Many are noncontroversial like the tropical flavoring mangosteen distillate, but others have prompted a backlash, like the sweetener aspartame, which critics say could be carcinogenic, and castoreum, an anal excretion from beavers that gives foods a musky taste and was traditionally added to vanilla flavoring, repulsing some consumers.
In recent years, more consumers have sought to rid their diets of such ingredients, often because of books, movies or advocacy groups that raised health concerns about additives, as well as a broader desire to know exactly what they are eating.
“I want it to be all natural,” says Chris Stanley, a 44-year-old sales executive at a Texas firm that provides information-technology services. He recalls that when he was a child in northern Indiana, pudding came in three flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and tapioca. “Now, there’s got to be five times as many kinds as when I was a kid.” Four years ago, Mr. Stanley decided to adopt a healthier diet. “I want there to be hardly any additives,” he says.
Consumer anxiety about additives has prompted companies to make marketing claims that many food shoppers find confusing. The U.S. doesn’t have a regulatory definition of the term “all natural.” But some consumers have filed lawsuits against companies including PepsiCo Inc. and Campbell for allegedly abusing that term—an allegation the companies deny.
The terminology can be confusing even when it is accurate. In a survey by consulting firm AlixPartners, only 9% of consumers said cyanocobalamin was good for them. When the item was listed by its more familiar name, vitamin B12, 97% said it was healthy.Many food-industry executives defend the safety and value of additives. But they are increasingly resigned to the shift in consumers’ attitudes.
“Regardless of what the science says, there is a great degree of cynicism about food technology,” said Jeff Dunn, chief executive of Bolthouse Farms, a fresh-juice company that Campbell acquired in 2012. “It just got to the point where people can’t understand it.”
Consumer demand for cleaner labels has doomed some additives. Subway sandwich shops this year scrapped a chemical called azodicarbonamide that helped its bread rise consistently, after some consumers complained that the same substance was used in yoga mats. Subway said it already had been planning to drop the ingredient.
To accommodate changing demand, flavor houses increasingly are turning to natural substances, such as using tomato or elderberry for red coloring, instead of Red 40 dye. About a decade ago, when Campbell was seeking to reduce the sodium content of its soups, one company suggested adding a compound that would allow the soup company to cut down on sodium without sacrificing flavor. But Campbell said it chose instead to switch to sea salt, which contains less sodium than common table salt, and is natural.
The shift to simple ingredients isn’t so simple. Key-lime flavor made with real limes, for example, is more expensive and complicated to produce because the fruits vary by season and crop. “Moving from artificial to natural there are always difficulties,” says Rod Sowders, Synergy’s chief executive. “We can do it, but it comes with a significant cost.”
Still, Synergy is trying to meet the challenge, investing in technology to create more flavors and extracts from natural sources like roots, seeds, fruits and flowers. “We’re being pulled into that by our customers, the packaged food companies,” Mr. Sowders said, “and their customers, the consumers.”
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