Thanks to its acquisitions of General Foods and Kraft, ten cents of every dollar that Americans spent on groceries now belonged to Philip Morris, which dramatically altered the balance sheets at the tobacco giant. Philip Morris was amassing mountains of cash from its cigarette sales and saw the food business as a way to diversify and put those profits to work. When it finished merging the two food giants in 1989, their combined annual sales of $23 billion accounted for 51 percent of the total revenue at Philip Morris.

“Who’s worth more to your store?” the study said. “The 32-year-old who just spent more than $10.00, or the teen who rang up a Coke, a sandwich and a candy bar? Surprisingly, the teen is worth nearly as much as the 30+ shopper today. Teens spend less, but they visit more often. If C-stores can hold on to teens’ business as they move into their 20s, these customers have the potential to be worth substantially more.” Even in the suburbs, where older teens visit convenience stores most often to buy gasoline, their second most-cited reason is to “satisfy a craving,” and these urges present a huge opportunity for growth. “Teens buy a little gas, a lot of times a month,” the study said. “Retailers need to recognize and take advantage of this frequency by making it easy for them to enter the store.”

“Sixty percent of supermarket purchase decisions are completely unplanned,” the Coke study says. “Anything that enables the shopper to make a faster, easier, better decision” will help spur these unplanned purchases.

“But in terms of flavor, there is that third leg of the stool that everyone forgets about, and that is the somatosensory, or the touch component, and this includes things like the tingle from carbon dioxide bubbles, or the bite from chili peppers, or the creaminess. In the case of CocaCola, what’s so interesting about it is you’re really activating all those modalities. You have those nice aromas from the vanilla and the citrus and the whole family of brown spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg. Then you have that sweetness. And there’s the bite of phosphoric acid, the tingle of the carbon dioxide. You really end up stimulating all the different parts of the flavor construct that we experience.”

We like foods that have an identifiable strong flavor, but we tire of them very quickly.

The flavor experts from Switzerland were basically saying that Coke was so dominant because of a recipe that made it forgettable—at least in the way the balance of flavors caused the brain to flash a continuous green light for more.

What made Coke evil—or, depending on who you are talking to, wildly successful—was the supersizing. As the obesity crisis was building in the 1980s, those cans gave way to 20-ounce bottles, with 15 teaspoons of sugar; liter bottles, with 26 teaspoons; and the 64-ounce Double Gulp sold by the 7-Eleven stores, with 44 teaspoons of sugar. Beyond the size of each serving, Coke’s success came from the numbers of these cans and bottles and cups that people, especially kids, were drinking every day. By 1995, two in three kids were drinking a 20-ounce bottle daily, but this was merely the national average. At Coca-Cola, executives didn’t speak of “customers” or even “consumers.” They talked about “heavy users,” people with a habit of two or more cans per day.

Research suggests that our bodies are less aware of excessive intake when the calories are liquid.

As Coke’s sales doubled and tripled and kept going up—along with those of Pepsi and other soft drinks—so too did America’s inclination to overindulge. In nutrition circles, where the causes of obesity are discussed, there is no single product—among the sixty thousand items sold in the grocery store—that is considered more evil, more directly responsible for the crisis than soda.

“The idea was to be in all those places where these special moments of your life took place,” Dunn continued. “Coke wanted to be part of those moments. That was, if not the most brilliant marketing strategy of all time, probably one of the best two or three. You not only had the imagery, it’s like somebody was in their own television commercial. You’re in the moment, you’re drinking the product, you have that emotional context that sets it. And Coke really came to have a very high share of those experiences. It was about having a ubiquitous presence. Inside Coke, it is called the ‘ubiquity strategy.’ In simple terms, Mr. Woodruff’s words for that were: ‘Put the product within an arm’s reach of desire.’ helped turn the soda into much more than a product. To the envy of

Woodruff, however, had another insight—this one not as frequently discussed in the business school case studies—that would help take the company from solid to spectacular. He figured out how to tap into people’s emotions better than anyone else in the industry of consumer goods, whether food or beer or cigarettes. His method didn’t require slogans or celebrity endorsements or the kind of money the company would spend every year on advertising, though all those things helped. It went deeper than that. It focused on getting Coke into the hands of people, especially kids, when they were most vulnerable to persuasion—those moments when they were happy.

“If you’re selling, Charlie’s Mom is buying,” it said. “But you’ve got to sell Charlie first. His allowance is only fifty cents a week, but his buying power is an American phenomenon. When Charlie sees something he likes, he usually gets it. Just ask General Mills or McDonald’s. Of course, if you want to sell Charlie, you have to catch him when he’s sitting down. Or at least standing still. And that’s not easy. Lucky for you, Charlie’s into TV.

The physician who had invented the cereal flake, John Harvey Kellogg, was quite a stickler on sweets, running his cereal company from a sanitarium where he banned sugar altogether.

Because what Moskowitz found is that hunger is a poor driver of cravings. We rarely get in the situation where our body and brain are depleted of nutrients and are actually in need of replenishment. Rather, he discovered, we are driven to eat by other forces in our lives. Some of these are emotional needs, while others reflect the pillars of processed food: first and foremost taste, followed by aroma, appearance, and texture.

«… many of the biggest slaughterhouses would sell their meat only to hamburger makers like Cargill if they agreed not to test their meat for E. coli until it was mixed together with shipments from other slaughterhouses. This insulated the slaughterhouses from costly recalls when the pathogen was found in ground beef, but it also prevented government officials and the public from tracing the E. coli back to its source.»

«Kellogg, for one, made me a saltless version of their mega-selling Cheez-Its, which normally I can keep eating forever. Without any salt, however, the crackers lost their magic. They felt like straw, chewed like cardboard, and had zero taste. The same thing happened with the soups and meats and breads that other manufacturers, including Campbell, attempted to make for me.»

The mere sight of a sugary treat will start the saliva flowing, which in turn primes the digestive system.