It felt not of this planet, obviously artificial in a culture that was quickly blaming all its dietary woes on science and mass production. For some consumers, the turnoff of Kraft wasn’t that it was made with cheese powder or prepackaged sauce, it’s that the cheese was traffic-cone orange. That may be the cover, but the real point is getting to feel virtuous while scarfing down a bowl of cheesy pasta. But the nutrition isn’t exactly the point for Smartfood, and it isn’t for Annie’s either.
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In fact, a box of Annie’s shells and white cheddar has 20 more calories than a box of Kraft Original mac and cheese, and comparable amounts of sodium and fiber, though Annie’s has fewer ingredients (and more organic ones) overall. Kraft and Annie’s aren’t that different, nutritionally.
In 2014, General Mills bought Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million. Given the success of Smartfood’s “healthy” branding over the other cheddar popcorns on the market, Withey gambled that customers would similarly enjoy a natural boxed mac and cheese over “artificial” Kraft, and advertised the product’s lack of synthetic coloring, additives, or preservatives. The brand started with Withey adding her powdered white cheddar - a combination of white cheddar cheese, corn oil, buttermilk, whey, and salt - to the noodles from a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese. Withey put the money into her next project, which would become Annie’s Homegrown. (Though, let’s be real, a slice of fried potato is as natural as a piece of popcorn coated with cheese.) Meyers specified it wasn’t health food, but it wasn’t not health food: “We set out to offer a better, smarter alternative to other snack foods,” he said.īy 1989, the team sold Smartfood to Frito-Lay for $15 million. It’s “unadulterated food, whole food, perceived by the customer as a natural product,” Meyers told the Boston Globe in 1987. Smartfood had the same calories as a potato chip, but its branding emphasized its wholeness. “Because popcorn is a high-fiber, whole-grain food, it is one of the rare snacks to earn the blessing of diet authorities, provided it’s not made in oil, drenched with butter and doused with salt,” wrote the Times. The group called the product Smartfood, and it rode the wave of ’80s diet culture and the growing desire for “natural” snacks to become a national hit. ‘’The popcorn turned out better than the package,’’ Meyers told the New York Times, and they began selling it in grocery stores in New England.
Withey filled the packaging with a batch of cheddar popcorn, using her own white cheese mix, not the neon stuff. In 1985, Ann Withey and her husband, Andrew Martin, along with partner Ken Meyers, were trying to demonstrate the abilities of a reclosable package Martin and Meyers had invented. Annie’s was founded in 1989, at a time when low-fat, high-fiber, and “natural” diets were all the rage, and was built off another “healthy” snack - Smartfood. It’s the flagship product for a brand that boasted $400 million in sales in 2017 thanks to its successful image as an “actually good for you” choice, or at least a quick option that’s not the worst. Powdered cheese, in other words, met Annie’s.Īnnie’s boxed mac and cheese is a go-to dinner for parents and college students alike. But then the blue box got some company, and against all odds, powdered cheese became an ingredient with a halo of health, associated with a brand ubiquitous with “organic,” natural, homemade, and all the other things powdered cheese was not. It was “processed” food, cheap, meant for unsophisticated palates (i.e., you likely first ate it as a kid). When you first became familiar with powdered cheese, it probably poured neon orange out of a Kraft packet, and in no way could you trace it back to a hypothetical cow.
James Lewis Kraft won a patent for a cheese-processing method in 1916, and because of that, his blue box of mac and cheese dinner can be found around the world. But others, like the powdered cheddar that adorns popcorn, puffs, and boxed mac and cheese, seem downright alien. Some feel quite natural, like the dried, crumbled Parmesan that may have adorned your dinner table or pizzeria counter. Methods of dehydrating cheese are “a means of preserving cheese solids under conditions to which natural cheese would not normally be subjected,” according to The Fundamentals of Cheese Science. Powdered cheese is an astounding innovation.
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