10/10/04 NYT piece on chocolate / cocoa / flavanols / Mars Inc. research, etc.
October 10, 2004
Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?
By JON GERTNER
For the past decade or so, Harold Schmitz, a boyish and
bookish food scientist, has overseen research at Mars Inc.,
the global food company that makes everything from Snickers
bars and Dove chocolates to Uncle Ben's rice and Pedigree
dog food. One morning last spring, Schmitz met me in the
lobby of Mars's North American headquarters, a sprawling
industrial complex on a busy road just outside
Hackettstown, N.J. The Hackettstown plant is crucial to the
Mars business not just for its output -- half of the M&M's
sold in the U.S. are produced here -- but also for its
research labs. We reached these after Schmitz steered me
through security turnstiles at the entrance, a series of
carpeted office suites and a labyrinth of polished concrete
hallways dense with the dusty, sweet scent of cocoa. The
aroma grew deeper and more intense along the way, until it
seemed all at once to seep past my nose and my throat and
into my mind. Chocolate bars were all I could think about.
'It gets into your clothes too,' Schmitz said amiably as
we walked. 'We just get used to it.'
Schmitz has spent most of his time at Mars working on
something known in-house as the 'healthy chocolate'
initiative, an expensive, 15-year investigation into the
molecular composition and nutritional effects of cocoa, one
of chocolate's primary ingredients. In recent years, these
studies -- undertaken first by company technicians and
later by Mars-financed academics in the U.S., Europe and
Australia -- have prompted Mars to aggressively pursue
patents for dozens of new (and often strange) methods of
manufacturing and ingesting cocoa products. The claims,
submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, that
cocoa can be used 'in the maintenance of vascular
health,' or as an 'anti-platelet therapy,' or 'in
tableting compositions and capsule-filling compositions,'
at first glance seem more pharmaceutical in nature than
food-related. Certainly they would seem to have little to
do with the day-to-day concerns of a company known mainly
for its candy. And yet Schmitz's mission is to 'reinvent'
cocoa and chocolate, as he put it -- to optimize both taste
and health benefits and then help Mars cash in.
Fortunately for Schmitz, time and money are no object at
Mars. As a private corporation -- without question among
the three or four largest in the country, with yearly sales
of about $17 billion -- Mars has no obligation to
shareholders and no need to justify its larks. Indeed, the
company's longstanding and intense culture of privacy has
made it corporate America's supreme enigma. As a matter of
policy, executives do not give interviews. The company's
cocoa research has provoked a measure of puzzlement from
its competitors, but Mars -- an eccentric, Wonkalike entity
if ever there was one, effectively controlled by the
semiretired Mars brothers, Forrest, 73, John, 68, and their
sister, Jacqueline, 65, whose combined worth was recently
estimated at $30 billion by Forbes magazine -- just goes
about its scientific work without pause or comment.
Recently, however, Mars has started to peel back the
wrapper. Company representatives gave me a couple of
explanations why. Mars executives apparently believe a less
murky image will help them attract talent, for one; for
another, those same executives believe that Mars needs to
respond to consumers' increasing demands to know more about
the companies they buy products from. Neither of these
exactly reveal what may be the real motivation, though,
which is that Mars is about to start selling something new
and vexingly complex, at least from a marketing standpoint.
Once Schmitz and I finally reached the Hackettstown
laboratories, he handed me a white coat and safety glasses
and took me inside. The lab had been cleared of Mars
employees for my visit -- old habits of secrecy die hard --
except for one person: John Hammerstone, a colleague of
Schmitz's who sat at a table in the large room, amid the
loud hum of machinery, surrounded by a pile of cocoa pods
and vials of cocoa. As we joined him, Hammerstone launched
into a brief tutorial on the future of chocolate as Mars
sees it, a kind of Cocoa 101.
Hammerstone picked up a yellow cocoa pod, a hard-shelled,
lemon-shaped fruit, placed it on the table and smashed it
open with a hammer. He then scooped out several large seeds
-- what are known as the beans -- from the pulp inside.
Next, he peeled the skin of one seed to reveal its deep
violet hue. In a raw state like this, cocoa beans are
exquisitely bitter and virtually inedible. Before they make
their way into a chocolate bar, they must follow a
convoluted route that begins in Africa, Asia or Latin
America with their harvest from cacao trees; the process
continues with their fermentation and sale, usually to
wholesalers like Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill, and
finishes with their roasting, transport, grinding and
transformation into chocolate liquor, which can in turn be
separated into powdered cocoa and cocoa butter. Producers
like Mars and Hershey's then buy these raw materials. What
we call chocolate is, essentially, the highly processed
combination of the cocoa butter, chocolate liquor and
sometimes powdered cocoa that are derived from the beans,
and which is then combined with sugar, emulsifiers and
(often) milk.
One byproduct of this process is that the candy bar you eat
today may include a combination of cocoas from three
different continents. Another is that the traditional
processing methods -- especially the fermentation, roasting
and what's known as 'dutching,' which is the addition of
alkali to mellow flavor -- strip the nutrients, and
especially the organic compounds known as flavanols, from
the beans. The majority of commercially available dark and
milk chocolates do not have significant levels of
flavanols. Nor do commercially available cocoas. 'Ten
years ago,' Hammerstone said, 'a Dove bar had almost
nothing.'
Yet the fact that Mars has been juicing up the flavanol
levels in its Dove bars over the past few years was not
exactly the point of Hammerstone's demonstration. Consider
instead the CocoaVia bar, which Mars introduced last year
and currently sells over the Internet. For Mars, CocoaVia
is a problem solver. Over the past few years, as concerns
over childhood obesity and carbohydrates have risen, the
growth in sales of candy and other snack foods has slowed
noticeably. Meanwhile, the market for functional foods, a
broad category that includes everything from
calcium-fortified orange juice to cholesterol-lowering
Benecol spread to drinkable supplements like Ensure, has
been increasing by up to 14 percent annually. Though Mars
might like us to think otherwise, chocolate could never
pass as a functional food, because of its high levels of
fat and its high number of calories. By and large, the
common perception of cocoa and chocolate's health
attributes have preceded any actual hard science; only now
is that science taking shape in large-scale, double-blind
experiments that lend credibility to the idea that
flavanols impart very real cardiovascular benefits. Yet
Mars is nonetheless placing a bet on flavanol-rich cocoa --
a main ingredient in CocoaVia, but one that is mostly free
of the rich cocoa butter in chocolate. 'This little bar
represents the culmination of a lot of research,' Schmitz
said, handing me a CocoaVia. 'But it's really only the
beginning. We're still learning, but nobody here questions
the idea that the opportunity is immense. It's a complete
business now. It's not just a research-and-development
kick.'
As soon as the marketing department deems the consumer
market ready -- perhaps within the year -- Mars intends to
start selling a new line of products, most likely a
powdered cocoa or cocoa drink that, while not explicitly
promising to lower blood pressure, say, or increase blood
flow (a potential boon for those suffering from vascular
disease), will nonetheless be backed by a number of coming
studies that suggest a range of possible, and significant,
health benefits along these lines. And Schmitz seems to
hope that cocoa -- or more precisely, his cocoa, which
means cocoa processed according to Mars's special methods,
with extremely high flavanol levels -- will then turn out
to be among the most potent and popular functional foods
yet created.
Functional cocoa got its start at Mars around 1990, just
after witches'-broom, a fungal infection, destroyed the
Brazilian cocoa crop. At the time, Mars executives wondered
if unlocking the chemical makeup of cocoa beans might
somehow lead to the synthetic replication of the beans'
taste, which would offer some protection against future
agriculture catastrophes. By the early and mid-1990's,
Schmitz recalled, he and other Mars scientists were
doubting they could mimic chocolate's distinctive (and
highly complex) flavor chemistry.
Schmitz, however, was becoming excited by reports in the
science press on the health benefits of antioxidants in
green tea and red wine. The flavanol compounds he was
analyzing in cocoa beans had chemical similarities to the
compounds he was reading about in those studies. And so,
under his direction, Mars began several test-tube
experiments at the Hackettstown labs to see if cocoa had
any effect on the cardiovascular system -- in particular,
on the endothelial cell lining inside blood vessels. Early
on, Schmitz began to focus on whether cocoa flavanols could
stimulate the production of nitric oxide and 'relax' this
lining. The relaxation of the endothelial layer results in
better blood flow. That relaxation, in simplest terms, is
good for the cardiovascular system.
When Mars's research produced encouraging results, Schmitz
said he knew that if the company's next step -- human
testing -- turned up compelling data, Mars would need to
change the way chocolate has been made for at least the
past century to bring a flavanol-rich chocolate to the
market. By the late 1990's, various scientists at Mars were
doing just that, working with growers in Indonesia and
Brazil to see if they could preserve flavanol levels at the
cocoa beans' harvesting and processing stages; their goal
was to identify the right kind of cocoa bean (there are a
number of genetic varieties) and to settle on a gentler,
minimal-fermentation, lower-heat processing method that
Mars could make proprietary. The biggest obstacle was
flavor. Hammerstone, Schmitz and other Mars technicians
worked on making a flavanol-rich cocoa taste good -- a tall
order, since flavanols impart bitterness and astringency
'like a young wine,' Hammerstone said. Ultimately, the
company claims, well over a hundred Mars employees around
the world were recruited to produce a marketable,
consistent-tasting, flavanol-rich cocoa. 'The initial
results were very discouraging,' Schmitz said. 'The cocoa
we were creating was difficult even for the lab subjects to
choke down. There were times where we really did wonder
whether this was possible.'
Yet by around 2000, Mars had a product good enough to start
mixing into M&M's and Dove bars. (The company continues to
work on the cocoa's flavor and on boosting its flavanol
levels.) Mars stopped short of rolling out a purely
functional powdered cocoa or cocoa drink; in part, Schmitz
explained, the company still didn't have the taste
chemistry down well enough to build a product around it.
But Mars also wasn't sure how strong the case for the
effects of cocoa yet were. And you can't really sell a
functional food without the function.
In its recent history, the Mars company has financed some
dubious and embarrassing science -- most notably in the
early 1990's, when it supported research that resulted in a
claim that chocolate was actually good for your teeth. It
has also sponsored reams of legitimate research. Helping to
create scientific studies (and related spin, frequently)
that boost its products' appeal has been a hallmark of
Mars's public-relations strategy for the past decade. This,
too, is the case for its high-flavanol marketing campaign,
which may have required as much forethought and expense as
the creation of the high-flavanol cocoa itself. From the
start, Schmitz's objective was to pursue broad scientific
credibility for the project. In the mid-1990's, the
company, at Schmitz's behest, undertook a strategy of
distributing cash and high-flavanol cocoa to academics.
Mars's largess was directed almost exclusively to
respected, independent researchers who publish their
results in peer-reviewed journals.
This investment first bore fruit in the late 1990's, when a
study by Carl Keen, chairman of the nutrition department at
the University of California, Davis, reported that the
flavanols in cocoa appeared to have a healthful,
aspirinlike effect on platelets. While Mars had spent at
least $800,000 financing Keen's studies, Keen told me he
had no qualms, then or now, about using private-industry
money, despite the potential for perceived bias; if other
food companies spent as much as Mars on studies, he said,
the science of nutrition might be much further along. In
Keen's opinion, moreover, the early data from the
Mars-sponsored cocoa experiments are so persuasive that
they may lead to a reconsideration of links between disease
and diet. 'Some of the drugs we have today are so powerful
that it's unrealistic to think of food as having the same
effect of reducing blood pressure as, say, ACE
inhibitors,' Keen said, referring to the commonly
prescribed class of drugs to combat hypertension. 'But I
would argue that there will be a number of foods in the
future that will help in maintaining health, or can be used
with drugs, and will have a preventative use.' Mars's
cocoa, he added, which is far richer than many green teas
and red wines in flavonoids (the class of naturally
occurring compounds that include flavanols), is at the top
of his list.
Ratcheting up Keen's expectations are the latest studies
from Norman Hollenberg, a professor at Harvard Medical
School and a former editor of The New England Journal of
Medicine. In 2003, Hollenberg and an assistant professor,
Naomi Fisher, published a paper in The Journal of
Hypertension offering exactly the kind of evidence Schmitz
dreamed about: cocoa flavanols appear to stimulate the
production of nitric oxide in blood vessels, which in their
subjects had the effect of relaxing the endothelial lining
and increasing blood flow to the extremities. Hollenberg
and Fisher both believe this has positive implications for
diabetics who suffer from a range of afflictions tied to
poor circulation. This month, a paper that Hollenberg wrote
with Schmitz for The British Journal of Cardiology
assembles the most recent data to bolster the case that
cocoa flavanols may have therapeutic potential for those
afflicted with various cardiovascular diseases.
When I visited Hollenberg in June, in his cozy book-lined
office tucked away on the ground floor of Brigham and
Women's Hospital in Boston, he said he was even more
encouraged by a pilot study he concluded a few weeks
earlier. The project measured whether subjects who drank a
cup of high-flavanol cocoa had an increased flow of blood
to the brain; on average, participants registered a 33
percent increase in blood flow. Hollenberg called the
results 'a grand-slam home run.' And he sees potential
applications for the vascular (non-Alzheimer's) dementia
that afflicts millions of Americans and is believed to be
caused by poor cerebral blood flow. No drug on the market,
Hollenberg added, appears to do what high-flavanol cocoa
has done in his initial studies.
Hollenberg, like Keen, is not shy about his corporate
sponsorship; he conceded that his work would not have been
possible without Mars. In the early 1990's, the Harvard
professor was researching whether certain genes might offer
protection from the onset of age-related hypertension. In a
few select cultures around the world -- in parts of New
Guinea, for instance, and in the highlands of China -- men
and women consistently show no increase in blood pressure
as they age. Some years ago, Hollenberg also happened to
come across an article written in the 1940's by an Army
surgeon in the Panama Canal Zone, noting that the Kuna
Indians, in the San Blas Islands of Panama, had extremely
low blood pressure, and that it did not climb as they got
older. 'The Kuna had a few things going for them,'
Hollenberg said. 'They were close, and American Airlines
flies direct from Boston to Panama City. I didn't have a
lot of money, but I had a lot of frequent-flier miles.'
The problem was that Hollenberg's initial visits turned out
to be disappointing. He recorded low blood pressure
readings for the Kuna, but he found little evidence of a
protective gene. When islanders moved to the mainland, for
instance, their blood pressure increased, which genetic
protection ought to prevent. And yet, one thing struck him:
the Kuna living on the islands drank a significant amount
of locally grown, minimally processed, high-flavanol cocoa.
Those living on the mainland did not.
Hollenberg soon stopped looking for protective genes and
started focusing on cocoa. In the mid-1990's, with his
support running low, a search for grant money led him to
the American Cocoa Research Institute, a trade organization
of confectioners; a few days later, Harold Schmitz called.
'Before I knew it,' Hollenberg said, 'I was flying to
Panama with Mars's lawyer to meet with the Panamanian
Ministry of Health so they could sign permission papers for
the study.' Mars has since covered the bulk of
Hollenberg's projects in Panama and Boston, costs easily
amounting to more than a million dollars. Yet this may
prove a pittance in the long run. For one thing,
Hollenberg, who sits on the advisory boards of several drug
companies, has advised the company as it considers sharing
its cocoa research with a large pharmaceutical company.
(Mars told me it is currently in talks.) And Hollenberg has
been forceful in pushing the idea of selling cocoa as a
functional food. Early on, he said, he told Mars's top
executives: 'You know, I don't think the issue is whether
there is going to be a flavanol-rich cocoa made for human
consumption. The issue is, who is going to profit from your
investment?'
In Hollenberg's view, there's a fortune at stake. 'It's
going to be a billion-dollar market, you can bet on it,'
he said. 'It's going to be on every mother's shelf. And a
year from now, when the news starts trickling out, every
old person is going to buy it.' He added: 'I think it's a
long-term strategy. If one could persuade school districts,
which are terribly concerned about junk food, to put
vending machines in to provide flavanol-rich hot chocolate
and cold chocolate -- well, do you happen to know who owns
most every vending machine around the world?' I did happen
to know. While Hollenberg overstated things somewhat, Mars
is a huge player in the vending business. Not only is it
among the leading providers of electronic components in
vending machines, but it is also the top company in
vending-machine candy sales. (Mars is second only to
Frito-Lay in overall snack-food sales at those machines.)
'It could happen,' Hollenberg continued, seemingly
entertained by the fine carpentry -- tongue into groove,
tenon into mortise -- of such a business strategy. 'And to
think that Mars began all this without a product in mind.
Who knew?'
But selling a mass audience a high-flavanol cocoa, for
example, is by no means simple. The marketplace is littered
with functional-food failures from big, smart companies
like Nestle and Campbell's, which thought they could design
a best-selling yogurt or a frozen dinner with
health-conferring properties. This largely explains Mars's
caution. When I visited the Hackettstown headquarters a
second time, this past summer, I sat down with Schmitz and
Jim Cass, the marketing vice president at Mars charged with
creating a campaign for the coming line of high-flavanol
products. Cass told me that with CocoaVia, the company has
decided for now to restrict the bars directly to consumers
on the Web. This way Mars can create a database of buyers
and even contact them individually, to understand how
they're reacting to the product and how large the potential
base might be for similar foods. Cass explained: 'It's
something that we've talked about -- how far can these
healthful benefits go? To the kids' market? Maybe. And we'd
like to maybe understand that. Is this just a market for
boomers, or those who lead an active life, or the wellness
seekers? That's why we're taking this calculated learning
approach before we do anything on a national or much larger
basis.'
There are other hurdles that have nothing to do with
marketing, however. Hollenberg's cocoa-flavanol findings --
though effectively duplicated this summer by Mary B.
Engler, a non-Mars-financed professor at the University of
California, San Francisco -- could lose some of their
promise as they are tried in larger and more involved
trials. Then there's the uncomfortable fact that Mars is,
first and foremost, a candy maker. As Carl Keen, at U.C.
Davis, put it: 'If Mars were some sort of juice company,
they would find this far easier to market, but they're in a
difficult position because they're a confectionary company.
The marketing here is much, much more difficult than if
they were selling a fruit or a vegetable.' Schmitz, too,
has no illusions about what's ahead. 'Nutrition is already
controversial,' he said, 'and you can imagine that
chocolate nutrition is about 1,000 times more
controversial.'
It's not reassuring that Mars seems unwilling to draw a
clear line between making subtle health claims for
chocolate and making forthright health claims for cocoa. Or
perhaps it's more accurate to say that Mars draws a clear
line, then seems to step over its edges, much like an
artful politician. In both of my visits to Hackettstown,
for instance, Mars executives made it clear that they think
it's irresponsible to claim that their research suggests in
any way that eating more of their chocolate is good for
you. That's why the company does not draw attention to the
fact that M&M's, say, now have more flavanols than
competing brands. The notion of pushing a 'healthy'
candy, especially to kids, is perhaps one of the last
remaining taboos left in the marketing world. At the same
time, Mars executives weren't hesitant to claim that their
research has created an upside: it can 'reduce the guilt'
from the daily chocolate habit, especially if the daily
habit includes a Dove dark bar, which caters to adult
palates and contains about 150 milligrams of flavanols.
It's hard not to imagine that a sister brand, like M&M's,
would benefit from that same upside.
To consumer food advocates like Marion Nestle, a professor
of nutrition at New York University, this borders on the
absurd. Nestle (who is not related to the food company)
says she thinks guilt is part of chocolate's inherent
appeal; she also takes the position -- extreme, by her own
admission -- that no food should be packaged with health
claims, not even wine, walnuts or blueberries. 'Everything
isn't a health food,' Nestle said. 'Or put it another
way: unprocessed foods are health foods. Once you start in
on processed foods, you're talking about marketing. This is
marketing, pure and simple.' Her position is echoed by
consumer groups like the Center for Science in the Public
Interest, which has criticized Mars in the past for making
health claims for chocolate, and which has tried (generally
without success) to call attention to questionable health
claims, often carefully and legalistically worded, for new
functional foods. 'What has happened is that we've gone
from having virtually no health claims on labels to a
free-for-all where companies can say almost anything they
want with almost no evidence,' said Bonnie Liebman,
nutrition director of the center. 'It has gotten so that
consumers can't identify the foods that truly may be
beneficial. The overall trend is good news for the industry
and not such good news for the consumer.'
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has not taken
a position on Mars's high-flavanol cocoa, or on CocoaVia,
which is currently packaged with the suggestion, 'Be good
to your heart everyday.' And at Mars, Cass and Schmitz
remarked that they don't think too highly of what's in the
functional-foods marketplace at the moment, either. Both
men said they consider the science on their cocoa so
promising for consumers, and the product so natural and
unadulterated, that they're loath to compare it to anything
currently available, perhaps with the exception of red
wine, which exploded in popularity in the early 1990's
after several studies revealed potential health benefits.
Nevertheless, the novelty of what Mars is doing, and the
fact that it is a food producer and not a drug maker, makes
it hard to know where to come down on the company. If the
flavanol research holds up, do you applaud a mammoth
multinational corporation that probably spent tens of
millions in an effort to 'capitalize' (as Jim Cass put
it) on a product that may help confront a leading cause of
mortality in America? Or do you instead doubt its
intentions -- and likewise its products -- because Mars
cares only about fattening its bottom line?
Hollenberg, for one, is unfazed by how deeply the business
and the science are intertwined. In his Boston office, he
told me that years earlier, he worked on the team that
began to explore the effects of ACE inhibitors -- a
once-in-a-lifetime experience, he had always thought, until
he started getting his flavanol results a few years ago.
'This is big news,' he said, 'from the point of view of
the future of cardiovascular medicine -- we think. But
there is going to have to be the investment of millions of
dollars to convert 'we think' to 'we know.' ' Hollenberg
said that those millions ultimately won't come from Mars,
since the company's interest in expensive cocoa studies
would certainly diminish once it created its line of
products and had assembled a portfolio of strong scientific
studies. That would only make sense, Hollenberg admitted
with a shrug. Also, he speculated, the day Mars moves on
may not be so far off.
Hollenberg then took me into the lab next to his office and
asked an assistant to make me a cup of experimental
high-flavanol cocoa -- the kind that Mars is still
tinkering with as a commercial product, he said. I had just
seen the charts on Hollenberg's subjects who had responded
to the drink (which contains about 500 milligrams of
flavanols) with a massive increase in blood flow to their
brain, some by as much as 40 percent. I took a taste. As
far as I could tell, there was little physical reaction; I
felt more alert after a few sips, a symptom perhaps
attributable to the caffeine (a fraction of what's in a cup
of coffee) or, more likely, to the liveliness of its
flavor. The taste is more akin to a dark, fruity, slightly
bitter chocolate.
'Now, that's not so bad, is it?' Hollenberg asked.
And
it wasn't, I had to admit. Not bad at all. Then again, we
were only talking about the taste. The harder question was
how good it is.
Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for the magazine. He
most recently wrote about Whole Foods Market.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company. |
