In June 2010, a small group of frozen-pizza technicians, cooks and marketers met in conference room in Chicago.
They had been summoned to report to Paul Bakus, an executive at Nestle. This team had developed DiGiorno pizza for Kraft, and came along when Nestle bought Kraft's frozen-food business in January of that year. Nestle is known for its chocolate Crunch bars, of course, but it makes all sorts of food：frozen meals, bottled water, bouillon cubes, Hot Pockets, instant noodles, baby food and dog food. It is, in fact, the world's largest food company.
But unless Stouffer's French Bread Pizza counts, Nestle didn't make pizza in the United States at that time. Bakus was new to pizza, too. He had done a tour of duty at Nestle's Swirs headquarters before he was sent home to head the American baked-goods division. From there, he was transferred to run the frozen-pizza business from Solon, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland where Nestle develops all its frozen food.
DiGiorno, the line Kraft created in 1995, became a market leader for its “rising crust,” which, unlike other frozen pizza crusts, starts raw and rises in the oven. The crust was the centerpiece of DiGiorno's pitch to consumers：that it could pass for delivery. But now that DiGiorno was a Nestke product, it would have to be brought into compliance with Nestle's nutritional standards. Bakus was sent to Chicago to talk about sodium.
“Sodium reduction could save hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs.”
Sodium is in pretty much everything we eat, in part because it tastes good and in part because it's an effective and cheap preservative. Some 75 percent of the salt in Americans' diets comes from packaged and restaurant food, leaving just 25 percent under most people's control. Many public health officials say the single most important thing Americans can do to fight heart disease - still the leading killer in the United States - is cut back on sodium. In June, the Food and Drug Administration released new preliminary guidelines for reducing sodium that it urged food makers to follow. As of now, the rules do not have the force of, the food makers have seen the writing on the wall for some time.
Ahead of the day when guideline become mandatory reductions, these companies have for years been working on systematically lowering the sodium in their products. Kraft did. Mars and Campbell's did, too. Walmart reformulated its private-label line with an across-the-board 25 percent sodium reduction. For any company, however, this long-term strategy brings with it near-term risk：Consumers associate low sodium with less flavor, and they tend to avoid products touting it.
At the same time, Bukus's competition was cutting away at frozen pizza's main advantage over delivery：convenience. Domino's has been investing in technology, shortening delivery times with Uber-influenced algorithms. The company has even outfitted delivery trucks with ovens so they can muscle through traffic while cooking their cargo.
Frozen pizza had to adapt - something everyone in the room knew perfectly well, they told Bakus. They'd been trying. But pizza is tricky. In the sauce, salt is there for taste and can be turned up and down at will. In cheese and sausage, it's part of traditional preservation that became encased in the F.D.A.'s “standards of identity,” which determine what manufacturers are allowed to say about ingredients on labels. Take out too much salt, and they might have to call their provolone something like “cheese product.”
The problem, the team told Bakus, is that on top of the meat and cheese - considerable in DiGiorno's three-meat pizzas and cheese-stuffed crusts - the dough had higher-than-usual amounts of sodium. Packaged bread, in which sodium is used for texture and preservation more than for flavor, is one of the greatest sources of salt in the American diet. In the DiGiorno's crust, the higher-than-usual sodium came from the baking powder Kraft used to make the dough rise. The DiGiorno food scientists had managed to create a pepperoni pizza with 10 percent less sodium, already something of a feat. Bakus thought they'd done fine：At a tasting, he couldn't tell the difference between the original and the reduced-sodium version. But pepperoni loyalists could.
The chief requirement for reformulating a beloved product is to change it imperceptibly, so that in blind tastings customers prefer the new version to rival products or the old version. (Nestle's rule is that six in 10 people must prefer an item in blind tastings before it is cleared for production.) And once a reformulated food passes the test, companies often avoid saying anything on the label or in advertisements about the nutritional improvements - especially when it comes to salt. Most people don't think they need to cut back on sodium. Better to say nothing. It's known in the trade as “stealth health.”
Big food makers are pinned between two groups with overlapping interests. One is consumers looking to improve their health, many of whom have long been deeply suspicious of big food companies and are even more so today. The other is public health officials and regulators who are willing to force companies to make bigger changes than they might want to, before they might want to. Do too much and they'll lose their customers；do nothing and they'll keep making money but risk losing a future lawsuit. Nestle and its competitors are busily trying to figure out a way to split the difference. But can frozen pizza really be expected to improve the health of the American public? And will anyone want to eat it if it is made to do that?
