Kraft Reveals Revamped Mac and Cheese, 50M Boxes Later
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
First we put a little survey on every search result that said "Are you satisfied with these results? yes/no". After we collected enough data, we changed the entire search backend out, but told no one.
After a few months of collecting data showing the satisfaction go from ~70% to ~90%, we made a blog post explaining what we did.
Here's the real kicker though that makes it different from Kraft -- we didn't say that we had done it months ago, so we kept getting comments about how it was "so much better this week vs. last week".
We did that a few times. When we moved the site to EC2, we announced it months after the fact, and people would claim to have noticed the "sudden change".
It's an interesting look into the human psyche.
I'm not so sure Reddit's system is that similar. Reddit had a serious issue with search functionality not reaching the desired effect, and was easily circumvented by using Google search directly on reddit.
In reddit's case it was about completing a task and reaching a goal ("I now can search for something and it works"), for Kraft this is about perception and desire ("This tastes good!").
Ad agencies doing marketing? Those bastards!
That's a fair assessment in regards to the search example, but the move to EC2 example is completely analogous. If we had announced the change when it happened people would have said it was bad right away, but by announcing it after the fact we could point out that no one noticed until we said something (which we did in the comments after they said they noticed something).
>If we had announced the change when it happened people would have said it was bad right away,
It's the same thing every time some major website redesigns some feature - lots of consternation about how the new thing is so much worse and how this will spell the end of the website as we know it. Petitions to revert the change will be made, chain emails will be sent, the whole works.
And then a week later nobody remembers this even happened, and the website's numbers stay exactly where they are/go up.
Canonical example of this in my mind is Facebook. More recently when Twitter made "faves" into "hearts" - many a thinkpiece was written on Medium about this.
My kids, who fancy themselves mac & cheese connoisseurs, started complaining about the taste of Kraft a couple of months ago.
So now when Kraft advertises on TV that they changed their mac & cheese and nobody noticed, my eight- and six-year-old just roll their eyes. I suppose the upside is, they're already learning that you can't believe advertising.
Bravo.
My guilty pleasure is a big bowl of mac and cheese, with cubed fried Spam mixed in.
Sodium citrate mac cheese is enough to Google for.
White cheddar powder is also great if you want to make a cheese sauce with a roux base reasonably quickly and for some reason don't want to use shredded cheese (I usually use both, however, but it is faster with a powder).
Here's some of the ones I use:
https://nuts.com/cookingbaking/powders/cheddar-cheese.html
https://nuts.com/cookingbaking/powders/white-cheddar-cheese....
This is supremely unfussy. Best part is the cheese sauce reheats perfectly. The final result is creamy and can be made with any cheese on hand to taste. (Smoked Gouda is astoundingly good)
Your instructions above is my "bachelor version", but grating some cheese into water with sodium citrate while the pasta water is coming to a boil is ridiculously easy and will produce an actual sauce, unlike the melted globs of cheese produced in the bachelor version.
1. boil water
2 stir in pasta, cook 8-10 minutes
3 strain pasta
4 add 3 Tbsp of milk
5 sprinkle cheese powder
6 add pasta and combine
[1]
And from kraft its:
1 boil water, stir in pasta, cook 8-10 minutes
2 drain, return to pan
3 add milk, butter, cheese powder and combine [2]
Its the exact same process either way.
Are you saying you buy kraft dinner boxes and then use only the macaroni noodles (making the rest of the macaroni and cheese from scratch)? Why dont you just buy a box of macaroni noodles?
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lVBCtTygO2g/Ufavcs5SauI/AAAAAAAAAd...
[2] http://northsouthfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/info1.j...
[1] The "Italian pasta made with rice" versions. I'm not talking about Asian rice noodles.
[2] The rice noodles tend to give off more starch into the water and you need more water to make them. If you don't have enough water, then it gets super starchy in the pot and easily boils over (and can -- seemingly -- take longer to cook, the starchier the water is).
Prep is the same, but it's actually cheaper to make.
Not salty enough for mac and cheese though. I've tried adding salt, or garlic salt, or parmesean, or a mix of the three. I haven't perfected it yet.
I have an abhorrence for horrible tasting, jello-like cheese products. Are there any that taste good.
Casserole!
The main advantage of packet-mac-and-cheese is convenience, compared to laboring over a stove to make a smooth roux.
I used to take a couple of packets with me when bicycle-camping but I can't say that I enjoyed them. They 'fill a hole' as we say here.
Kraft Mac & Cheese is the spiritual equivalent of top ramen noodles, artificial cheese flavor.
There is no intrinsic American cultural value to it. Many of us do grant it some nostalgia value, because we grew up without a lot of money, and it was, and still is, cheap and filling food for poor people. A suitable protein accompaniment is a can of chunk light tuna (solid albacore is for rich folks), hot dogs (aka frankfurters) cut into coin-sized slices, diced bologna slices, Spam, or a hard-boiled egg. To drink, mix up some unsweetened Kool-Aid with 3/4 the ordinary amount of added sugar. If you are feeling flush this month, you may also have a slice of dry white toast with some leftover schmaltz on it.
Looks like it's ~$3 for a pack on this side of the pond.
The more traditionally British options are probably these:
1) In a can: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=252750031
2) Cheese sauce: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=258436291
3) As a ready meal / microwave meal: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=272971891
But I'm more amused by the "Tesco Easy Entertaining Macaroni Cheese 1.4 Kilograms". Is it still necessary to thank the cook, if served this at a party? http://www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=291659455
Here is an 1859 version of the recipe, from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10136/pg10136-images.htm...
And here's the original, from 1786 in The Experienced English Housekeeper: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.rsmcze;view=1up;se...
It cleverly evokes the idea of better food, so that what you are actually eating seems somehow less disappointing. There are other brands that reproduce more faithfully the concept of the original recipe, but they may cost 2-5 times as much as Kraft's.
Also, a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese can be prepared in one saucepan on one stove burner or hot plate in less than 15 minutes, spent mostly waiting for the water to boil, whereas "real" macaroni and cheese recipes may involve cheese graters, pasta strainers, multiple saucepans, and maybe even a casserole dish and time in the oven. This point may be important if you have to feed your kids quickly after school, before going to your second job, as many heads of household in the U.S. are required to do in order to fund the monthly budget. (The kids might be able to eat both breakfast and lunch at their schools, depending on the relative affluence of the neighborhood.)
Of course not, Kraft Dinner is the national dish of Canada.
On a personal note, I find the color to be nauseous.
Her recipe goes something like this, E&OE, bit fuzzy on quantities, but dear Lord it's delicious:
Get your macaroni boiling away.
Then in a separate saucepan:
Couple tablespoons of butter.
Melt that.
Tablespoon of white flour.
Tablespoon of Coleman's mustard powder.
Incorporate gradually, stirring until it's smooth paste.
Milk (I forget how much, I know how much to pour, like a mug's worth?)
Add slowly, keep stirring, keep smooth.
Sufficient grated cheddar cheese, I like about 50% mature, 50% lighter, put about half in.
Same, keep it smooth.
Season around about now.
Stir in the macaroni, getting all the goo worked in.
Stir in a large tin of whole plum tomatoes.
Keep stirring, get it all even.
Transfer to a baking dish.
Put the remaining cheese on top.
Heat in an oven, 350f, 45m I think just get it hot and melty.
Brown under the broiler to get awesome caramelized crispy cheese top.
Serve with lettuce so you don't feel like a total fat bastard (actually the ice cold crunch is a great complement).
Sleep.
One is easy, the other is hard.
There are APIs and libraries for OCR, so that might not be so bad (even on a mobile device). A low-end phone is faster than the first PCs I did OCR on anyhow, and about 20 years more research has gone into algorithms.
If your ingredients data is getting stale, you could reward users with coupons for stale-data items, so some users will take pictures of the ingredients list (kind of a 'bounty' list). You could do this for new items too - e.g. a popup after the picture is taken saying you can get $0.50 off if you take a picture of the UPC and ingredients list. Do a visual diff on the ingredients photo to see if the they have changed, and if so, OCR it to the database.
- price of product
- food mass of product
Those vary invisibly all the time, and it'd be great to have a record of it.
So many food brands are now just meaningless words in someone's brand portfolio. Especially silly when the two main competitors for an item turn out to now be owned by the same parent and rationalised to be made in the same factory.
They get traded around like football cards.
After talking to people about it though, it became apparent that most grocery shoppers already have an idea of where they are going to buy groceries, making location more important than price. It's a razor thin industry, and even the price-sensitive coupon-using folks almost always just go to the closest Safeway equivalent.
We have them :-) We also store every single revision of the product, but we don't display the changes yet.
Join us on http://slack.openfoodfacts.org to see how we can just do that.
This includes even very big name brands, such as Doritos. For a long time, Doritos was gluten free in nearly all of its flavors except its "default" Nacho Cheese flavor. Suddenly and silently, it went gluten free. I don't know exactly when because I wasn't looking. I was actually trying to show someone that only that flavor had the wheat in it, except the bag went and contradicted my claim. I may have missed it but I don't think they ever publicized it, or if they did, it wasn't much. (Contrast, for instance, Corn Chex which has talked about being gluten free on its box now for years after it changed.)
Imitation crab meat is another example; it has gone from reliably containing wheat, to unreliably being gluten free depending on brand, to what appears to be converging on generally not containing wheat, just in the past few years. I'll still be checking labels for a while on that one, though.
(And before the inevitable commenter pops up: The things that I do not know whether they contain wheat are, pretty much by definition, the highly-processed foods high in refined carbs, so my examples have a selection bias in that direction. I do not eat either of the things I mention often or in quantity. But I'm not always 100% in charge of my food environment and it is nice at someone else's party to be able to eat something sometimes.)
Good find!
But as have been indicated here http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35727244 , this may be counterproductive.
My friend has celiac, my co-worker is mildly allergic to wheat, I'm sensitive to gluten.
Too much gluten makes me gassy so I avoid large quantities, but that's pretty much it. My co-worker breaks out in hives. My friend is in for a world of hurt.
But at this point in my life, it also no longer matters for me. It is certainly the case that I must avoid gluten now. And, alas, to the extent that it matters for my children, they're almost certainly also going to be biologically-grown-up before we have any solid answers either. In the meantime I just do my best for them.
Later, it jumped, and he was upset about the change, and contacted Tesco - turns out they change the mix for each batch based on the price of certain beans - if the sweeter beans are more expensive, they put in more of the others and add more sugar to try and keep the taste consistent, while keeping costs low.
It makes sense, but it is a pain for people with dietary restrictions (or just those trying to track their intake accurately).
Do people pretend to have celiacs? God why?
Then you get people who reason themselves into "Gluten-free!" must be a good thing! I blame the "____-free" moniker often being related to "healthier for you" diets. People will seek out "gluten-free" and there have been cases of restaurants serving "gluten-free" food that wasn't actually "gluten-free".
I've heard a number of cases from actual gluten sensitive individuals who have a love/hate relationship with this fad.
1) More gluten-free things to choose from! Yay!
2) More "gluten-free" things that can potentially kill them, causing them to have to be even more careful than they already were with what they choose to eat! Boo!
At least in Brazil, every time the formula of a product, or the quantity in the package, is changed, companies have to disclose that on the packaging.
Here, the packaging must describe the contents and that description must be accurate, so changes must be reflected there. But nothing requires them to say "hey, we changed this" beyond changing the nutritional information, which most people don't pay attention to.
Legislation forcing companies to disclose that something has changed in a more noticable (less specific) way, would no doubt just result in those warnings always being there, making them just as useless (I mean, maybe you could say 'new formula as of <date>', but again, people are probably just going to ignore it with that much detail).
I think having the year+month of the last recipe change would work perfectly fine. If you care what the ingredients are, it's very easy to notice. Much better than 'new'. The goal is not to force anyone to care. The goal is to have information be convenient. Scouring the entirety of the nutritional info is not convenient. And adding the date is a minimal burden to the company.
If a reasonable person who's not paying attention doesn't notice it, it's not enough.
For example, ice-cream manufacturers make ice-cream with peanuts in it on the same line as everything else. However, because they clean it between runs it's supposedly fine, and wont list it... It's all good until I have a reaction and have no idea why.
If you have allergies it's a great reason to learn to cook your own food. As said, you should also always carry and EpiPen and other drugs.
Yes, but they may severely limit your life-choices, and it also defeats the purpose of ingredient labelling (if you can't rely on it).
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/11/01/242412024/kraft-dims-that-mac-and-cheese-artificially-orange-glow
Americans take their soda very seriously (or at least did in the 80s). It makes the hoo-ha over Kraft buying Cadbury, a British staple similar to how Coke is/was an American one, and the changes they made since (some of them within days of the purchase despite having promised the government otherwise to get the deal to go ahead) look like a storm in a tea-cup.
I'd inquire about the taste, if it's any different, etc, but I haven't had Kraft in, uh, a long ass time.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/2...
Of course from the articled submitted they said people were already saying that could taste the difference before the change was ever made.
I seem to recall a massive cheese redistribution campaign back then. And ketchup being declared a vegetable for purposes of school lunches.
Mondelez are well on the way to destroying the Cadbury brand here.
One of the things Kraft made a big deal of during the takeover was promising to keep a particular UK plant open. 7 days after finalisation they announced the plant's closure.
Creme Eggs are now revolting, It's not even Cadbury choclate any more, but some sugary cheap fake chocolate. Being egg shaped, they were commonly sold in packs of 6, now sold in 5s - same price. They're also markedly smaller.
They've fiddled with most products, generally made them noticeably worse, and shrunk the sizes of nearly everything.
I buy other makes these days.
Chicago may be the candy capital of the world, but let's just say that not all innovation in confectionery is to the ultimate good of the consumer. I don't know how, exactly, it has come to this, but I believe many of the chocolate-like products sold in the US are now labeled as "chocolate candy", as they no longer even meet any of the American legal definitions for chocolate.
It makes it really easy to adhere to a low-sugar diet when all the "chocolate" around you is junk.
Be glad if your chocolate still has actual cocoa butter in it, instead of coconut oil, palm oil, palm kernel oil, or shea butter. Or even sunflower or safflower oils!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadbury_Creme_Egg#Changes_to_p... http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-may19apr19-story.html
I feel like on bootup you'd realize that your work was broken.
I've been using a mac at my new job, and a dialog box popped up today asking if I wanted to update. The options were something like "Not now" and "Update all". How am I supposed to know if I want to update if I don't even know what's going to be updated?
That line from one of her articles sums up her thought process perfectly.
Having watchdogs like the Food Babe keeps companies a bit more on their toes about the health impacts of their additives than they would be otherwise.
A quick google seems to indicate that is just the same inciteful(note: not insightful) nonsense to get page views.
Not to mention the fact that she is targeting a drink where the primary ingredient(s) are actually bad for you in the quantities they are served in unless you are already following a fairly well-balanced diet.
It is insane to single out minutiae that are orders of magnitude less impactful than the huge sugar bomb that is the core of the food/beverage.
Most ingredients are unnecessary. Nothing useful about picking random ones to complain about on that basis alone.
> Even if the additive is not harmful, as a consumer, it's good to have more knowledge about what Starbucks puts in their drinks.
In theory it's always good to learn things. In practice there is limited time throughout the day, and a popular enough food blog about harmless additives gets in the way of people trying to find out about harmful additives.
>Having watchdogs like the Food Babe keeps companies a bit more on their toes about the health impacts of their additives than they would be otherwise.
No it doesn't. It keeps them on their toes about ~spooky~ ingredients, and more likely to pick natural ingredients even when they are inferior or worse for you than artificial ones.
http://www.examiner.com/article/kraft-mac-and-cheese-ingredi...
Achieving that level of mythos about a product is an astonishing accomplishment.
It could be computerized pretty easily, it's just not.
> Maybe they [Kraft] worried too much. Even though the change was written on the box, nobody noticed or commented. That's how much people cared.
I agree with the comment I'm responding to; I think Kraft was completely correct to worry, for exactly the reason you state here.
Allegedly, Kosher For Passover Coke (which should be available soon if not already) uses sugar.
Some history: http://time.com/3769657/coke-passover-kosher/
They're not that dumb, and they're not that smart.
Sadly no appropriate MS-DOS jokes come to mind
The Japanese keyboard I use requires pressing shift to get a tilde (the tilde spot is occupied by a key to switch input methods on some keyboards and nothing on others).
Tilde opens the console in Doom 3, and it didn't like having it on a shifted character, and there was no way of rebinding the key. Long story short, I had to change the key in the source and recompile it to something else. Thanks id for open sourcing your games :-)
[/guy who was just modding NIBBLES.BAS yesterday]
Symbols are in different places compared to overseas keyboards (@ is to the right of P and doesn't require pressing shift, and ctrl and caps lock are swapped). It's not a problem except with old or lazy apps that expect them to be in a certain places, like my DOOM3 example.
There are a bunch of different Japanese layouts actually, a Japanese company makes keyboards with blank caps so you can use which ever one you like:
http://www.pfusystems.com/embedded-keyboard/hhkb/index.html
There is kana input, but I have yet to meet someone who uses that instead of an IME. I see a lot of people using it on their phones, though.
Well, dogs used to love them. You see, Natural Balance changed their formula without telling anyone. I'm going to guess that the most common use for Natural Balance dog food is to make treats, not a meal for dogs. The new formula crumbles when you try to cut it, and here's the important part: dogs won't eat it. So Natural Balance dog food is no longer fit for the most common purpose I see in personal observation. No trainer, pro or amateur, that I know of uses it anymore. The hoity-toity major pet food chain in Seattle no longer carries it.
No worries, Red Barn makes a tasty equivalent, so we use that now. But here's the kicker: even if Natural Balance pulled a Coca-Cola and put the old formula back, they've still lost us for an indefinite period (if not permanently). Why? Because we'd never know. We found an adequate substitute, Natural Balance is no longer on our radar, and it's not like The Dog Food Blog is in my RSS so I'd know when NB came to their senses.
One might get away with this with people food, as kids are more likely to bug Daddy with "but I want Kraft!" than a dog is to bug their handler with "What's this Red Barn crap? I want Natural Balance!" But if kids won't eat it, as implied by other comments, then Dad might try another brand, the kids love it even more than Kraft, and Kraft just falls off a family's radar. Because it seems to me that Kraft, as with Coke before them, assumes a brand loyalty that might or might not exist.
"Dear Mr. [my name] ,
Thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding Mrs. Grass Homestyle Noodle & Vegetable Soups. In an effort to continue offering a better product to our consumer, we've removed the Golden Egg Flavor Ball from our Mrs. Grass Homestyle Noodle & Vegetable Soups. The Golden Egg Flavor Ball will no longer be reflected on the packaging. One reason for package changes is to consolidate and reduce packaging. When we're able to do this, it benefits all of us as well as the environment. We also change our packaging in an effort to bring quality products to our consumers at the most affordable price. We all know that prices are increasing on everything from gasoline and corn to automobiles and houses. As costs go up, companies often find that they must raise prices to maintain high quality. The alternative to raising the price of any given product is to offer the product in a slightly smaller size. When we reduce the size of a product, it allows us to offer the product to our consumer at the best affordable price point. I appreciate you sharing your concerns with us. I will be sure to forward your comments to the Marketing and Production staff. It is our goal to continue to offer a variety of high-quality foods at the lowest possible cost to consumers. Thank you for contacting us and please add our site to your favorites and visit us again soon!
Sincerely,
Julian Franklin Director, Consumer Relations"
(Not really. But that'd be a cool story too.)
Other manufacturers are doing similar things. In fact, Trix Cereal has quietly switched away from artificial colors recently, and other General Mills "kids" cereals are expected to follow suit soon.
OK, add a few mins if you want to grill it with cheese topping, which improves it no end :)