Kraft changed its mac and cheese ingredients and nobody noticed: ‘We’ve sold well over 50 million boxes’

Usually when companies come forth with a brand new and improved formula, they want the general public to know. However when the item under consideration is an iconic food product, the calculus gets tougher. Every marketer remembers having a shudder the cautionary tale of New Coke.

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So when Kraft Heinz reached inside the blue box to tweak the recipe for its macaroni and cheese, it chose to whisper rather than shout the results.

A new formula that removed artificial preservatives and swapped out artificial dyes for any mixture of paprika, annatto and turmeric have been under development for 3 years, and in April 2015 Kraft announced that it planned to help make the switch. But when the reformulated version hit shelves in December, only customers paying careful attention towards the ingredients on the side from the box would have known. The orange hue of the mac and cheese remained exactly the same.

“We’ve sold more than 50 million boxes with essentially nobody noticing,” said Greg Guidotti, vice-president for meal solutions at Kraft Heinz.

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“This was absolutely brilliant of them to alter it and not say anything,” said Lynn Dornblaser, director of innovation and insight at the researching the market firm Mintel.



Now Kraft is getting a bit more vocal.

A new ad campaign plays in the component of surprise associated with the company’s new mac and cheese formula, with 15- and 30-second broadcast an internet-based video spots featuring the former late-night television host Craig Kilborn and the saying, “It’s changed. But it hasn’t.”

Kraft was concerned that individuals would perceive a general change in flavour that wasn’t really there whether it made too large an offer about the different formula when it started using it. Actually, when the company made the announcement last spring it would be tweaking the ingredients, Guidotti said, people began posting on social media their concerns that the mac and cheese would taste different.

Our first advice to them was not to tell anyone about this, which is unusual to have an ad agency

“We knew we desired to address that tension,” he explained.

Some on social networking even said, shortly after the April announcement, that they thought the mac and cheese tasted different when, the truth is, these were still eating the prior version. This is a psychological quirk, well known to food manufacturers, that can stymie well-meaning attempts to make junk foods healthier.

Overcoming such a hard-wired preconception required stealth.

“Our first advice for them wasn’t to tell anyone about this, which is unusual for an ad agency,” said Adam Chasnow, vice-president and executive creative director for Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Kraft’s partner in developing the campaign. “We’re likely to concentrate on the fact that situations are still exactly the same.”

Guidotti said that since the company says it absolutely was while using new formula for some time, customer comments continues to be generally positive, however, there was a spate of posts from customers claiming that they actually had noticed the change. “Whenever you say something, people will say, ‘Ok last one, I knew that,’ ” he explained. “There’s psychology involved in there too.”

When you say something, individuals will say, ‘Oh yeah, I knew that’

Before the campaign began, Kraft and Crispin Porter & Bogusky worried that the sharp-eyed fan or a food blogger would notice the changes to the ingredients list and act as a spoiler.

“I was always concerned,” Guidotti said. “Should consumers discover sooner, we’d contingencies. We’d lot of different ways of launching our advertising sooner, launching our social sooner, having more specific responses.”

None of that turned out to be necessary, not that Guidotti or his team are complaining.

“I think we probably did 5 times as much work, but it was all worth it,” he said.