A new UC San Francisco study reveals how Philip Morris Companies Inc. used cigarette research, flavor engineering, and behavioral science to turn Lunchables into one of America’s most successful ultra-processed foods for children.
When Phillip Morris acquired General Foods in 1985, it inherited Lunchables while it was still in development. The UCSF study shows for the first time how the company used what it knew from formulating cigarettes to design Lunchables and maximize their appeal to children.
The analysis, published June 3 in the American Journal of Public Health, sheds new light on how ultra-processed foods came to dominate the U.S. food supply, contributing to epidemics of childhood obesity and metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and fatty liver. Today, these foods make up nearly two-thirds of the calories consumed by U.S. children, and clinical trials show they lead to overeating and weight gain.
The paper explains why tobacco companies including R.J. Reynolds, which owned Nabisco and Del Monte, entered the food industry in the 1980s and how they helped trigger the spread of ultra-processed foods.
Philip Morris acquired and merged Kraft General Foods, creating the largest food company in North America, to increase revenues by sharing product design knowledge and proprietary research and development between tobacco and food.
The strategy was based on optimizing for “technical synergies” across the tobacco and food divisions.
Shelf-stable packaging and other innovations, like technologies to manage how flavor sensations are experienced, could be used to make both tobacco and food products, allowing for quicker scale-up at lower costs.
Lunchables, brightly packaged “grab-’n-go” meals that contain food in separate compartments, were designed to appeal to the child’s desire for play and independence, while relieving parents’ guilt by including familiar ingredients like Oscar Mayer processed meat and Kraft cheese.
Corporate memos and reports leading up to Lunchables’ 1988 launch show it was designed to appeal to kids’ desire to have “control over their lunch” and to give them “permission to play with their food.” “Lunchables aren’t about lunch,” according to an executive in the documents. “It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.”
When food designers needed to increase the palatability of artificial fats used to create Low-Fat Lunchables, Philip Morris provided tobacco experts in the neuroscience of nicotine and flavors who used electroencephalography (EEG) in sophisticated sensory testing on consumers.
“They used cigarette science to design these food products,” said the paper’s author, Laura Schmidt, PhD, a professor of Medicine and a member of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. “Science on how the brain processes flavors and what motivates consumers at the deepest levels. They used it to design ultra-processed foods. In fact, it’s the processing and flavor additives that distinguish ultra-processed foods from minimally processed foods. And that’s cigarette technology.”
The documents were produced in response to lawsuits, and they are now part of UCSF’s Industry Documents Library, a digital archive of 19 million records that includes collections from the opioid, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries.
Facing lawsuits and regulatory pressures, tobacco companies largely divested their food holdings by 2007 to focus on their core cigarette business. But the ultra-processed food industry kept growing.
Funding: No grant or contract funding was required to conduct this research.
Disclosures: Schmidt serves as an expert witness for plaintiffs in litigation involving necrotizing enterocolitis and infant formula marketing.
About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.eduor see our Fact Sheet.
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American Journal of Public Health