The Nestle's R&D is on a subterranean floor of a research center in the hills above Lausanne, Switzerland. It looks more like a sterile medical research lab than a kitchen. But the smells are not medicinal：deep odors of mushroom broth and fermented fish mingling with unidentifiable but sharp, acidic, vinegary scents.
When I visited several years ago, the company was already deep into what it calls its “kitchen cupboard” project, trying to cut out unpronounceable ingredients and build flavors without scary-sounding chemicals and hillocks of salt. I had recently visited David Chang's test kitchen for his Momofuku restaurants, where cooks were making variations on traditional fish sauce for new sauces, and the Nordic Food Lab, started with the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, where I saw racks and racks of koji, the mold that ferments rice to sake, being used to flavor all manner of grains.
By now, fermentation has become a very fashionable flavor-creation trick among chefs. Nestle's scientists hoped it could lead to substitutes for the dough conditioners they use to make their crust rise, which are not only bad for flavor but also have names that look particularly menacing on labels.
Sean Westcott, an energetic Australian who was then in charge of frozen and chilled foods, told me about a barley particularly rich in enzymes that the company is using to pizza dough - helping it rise and create flavor at the same time, and removing areas of syllables from the label.
When the DiGiorno team told Bakus they'd gone as far as they could to reduce sodium without having customers notice, and failed, he knew they needed to find out what was going on in the research center labs and Nestle's pizza businesses in other countries. So he took the team to Germany, Italy and Switzerland to learn new tricks. Within a year and a half of the initial discouraging tasting, the first reduced-sodium DiGiorno went on the market - with no mention of the reduction. I tried several varieties in Solon during a wide-ranging tasting. For the most part, I found them a little too salty, but that's just what people are used to.
There is, however, a larger problem with the American diet that lowering sodium cannot address：portion size. Frozen pizza is a particularly menacing vector for overeating. Chavanne Hanson, head of nutrition, health and wellness in global public affairs at the Swiss headquarters, says that customers know that candy and ice cream are occasional treats. They don't tend to eat too much of it at one sitting - or are conscious of indulging when they do.
Pizzas are different. They're big, and they're inviting. It's easy to take one more slice, and then another. “There's staggering social-media chatter on pizza,” says Mary Colleen Hershey, who monitors online discussion of company products for Nestle. “You can't believe how many people will admit they eat a whole pizza.”
With Bakus's encouragement, Hanson began a “portion guidance” program, telling customers to eat less of its product on the back of the package. The graphics on the package show what one-sixth of a pizza look like - about the size of a hand put over the pie as you cut a wedge, an easy mnemonic - and tell people to eat one slice for dinner and no more.
“Our surefire recommendation,” the company's guidance reads, one slice “along with a salad, roasted vegetables, fresh fruit and a glass of water or low-fat milk.” Well, it's a nice thought.
Such a civilized dinner might be an unlikely choice for the throngs who still think one pizza is one serving. And frozen pizza is unlikely solution to the vast and intertwined set of problems in Americans' diet. But it's a start.
Food makers' relentless advertising and bloated products, full of unnecessary sugar and salt, contributed to many of increasingly expensive chronic illnesses our health care system has been left to deal with. Lowering those costs might mean depending on big food companies and restaurant chains to clean up the mess they helped create.
