A History Lesson: How We Became the Supersize Food Nation

The idea can be traced back to a man named David Wallerstein, who ran movie the­aters in the 1960s. He tried method after method to get his cus­tomers to buy more than one order of pop­corn. Nothing worked. Then he real­ized why: peo­ple thought they would look like pigs if they bought two pop­corns. So he tried increas­ing sales a dif­fer­ent way, by offer­ing a jumbo size pop­corn. The trick worked. Popcorn sales
went up.

Nowadays, this profit-boosting trick is the stan­dard at any movie the­ater. Some the­ater chains require cashiers to inform every cus­tomer that they can have the next size up for an extra quar­ter or two. It’s a tiny amount of money to pay for a larger size of soda or pop­corn, but for the the­ater, those extra few cents are nearly all profit. The labor costs them the same to sell you a small pop­corn or a large one. The added cost of a box or a cup plus some syrup and water, or some pop­corn, salt and sea­son­ing is min­i­mal. And you as the cus­tomer per­ceive this as a great value.

Wallerstein’s bril­liant idea might have stayed in his the­ater chain, but in 1968, he became a direc­tor of McDonald’s. In the 1970s, the econ­omy was not on McDonald’s’ side, and cus­tomers were vis­it­ing the restau­rants less and less and then only buy­ing very lit­tle. Wallerstein con­vinced the chain to offer larger sizes of fries to boost sales—and, of course, it worked. Incredibly, the large size of fries from the late 1970s is the small size of fries today! The same is true of other menu items. The largest soda in 1955 was a mere seven ounces, smaller than the 12-ounce child size offered today.

The eco­nomic crunch of the 1970s brought the chain another inno­va­tion as well: the value meal. Fries and sodas both have higher profit mar­gins than burg­ers. Yet, while a penny-pinching diner might order a burger with no sides or drinks, nobody is going to come in for a meal and
order a soda or fries with­out a burger. A McDonald’s fran­chisee named Max Cooper pushed the com­pany to sell value meals and the rest is history.

It hardly took a rocket sci­en­tist to observe McDonald’s suc­cess and mimic it. Today super­siz­ing and value meals are stan­dard prac­tice in a num­ber of restau­rants. In fact, even sit-down restau­rants feel pres­sure to offer large serv­ings, since cus­tomers com­plain and feel cheated if they do not. And once a larger por­tion is placed in front of a diner, he or she is more likely to eat more food—especially if he or she is dis­tracted by another activity.

Take the case of pop­corn in movie the­aters. Moviegoers in one study were given either medium or large-sized con­tain­ers of five-day-old pop­corn to eat as they watched a film. Those with large pop­corns ate an aver­age of 50 per­cent more. As Linda Bacon writes in Health at Every Size, “They didn’t eat the pop­corn because it tasted good (it was stale!), they ate it because of the exter­nal cue—the con­tainer size.”

In some cases, mar­keters have fig­ured out how to get us to order what we might not oth­er­wise allow our­selves to eat. Take the Starbucks frap­puc­cino. A morn­ing cof­fee is nor­mal. A morn­ing milk­shake is not. Drinking sev­eral cups of cof­fee a day is nor­mal, but you might not allow your­self sev­eral milk­shakes in a day. By pre­sent­ing its frap­puc­ci­nos as fancy cof­fee drinks, not desserts, Starbucks has its cus­tomers lin­ing up to order “cof­fees” filled with sugar and topped with whipped cream and choco­late or caramel syrup start­ing early in the morn­ing. A venti choco­late cookie crum­ble frap­puc­cino has exactly 10 calo­ries less than a Big Mac. You want fries with that?

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