VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 58

In the meantime, Williams returned to the United States, where he joined the FDA to enforce Pure
Foods laws and then helped lead national nutrition campaigns during World War I. During the Roaring
Twenties, he entered the private sector as chemical director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, then a
hotbed of innovative applied science. In his spare time, however, Williams still pursued his driving pas-
sion. Finally, in 1936, after years of work, Williams announced that he had discovered an inexpensive
method for creating thiamin in a lab.
True to his ideals, Williams registered the patent for thiamin synthesis to a nonprofit dedicated to
funding humanitarian dietary research and set out to find industry partners who could deliver the product
to people needing it most. At first, two companies answered his call: the pharmaceutical giant Mer-
ck, which agreed to mass-produce synthetic B1, and General Mills, which agreed to include it in select
products. When the two companies approached Williams in 1938 with the idea of licensing synthetic
B1 for use in flour, they tantalized him with the promise of massive economies of scale, a national ad-
vertising campaign, and direct access to the 15 percent of the U.S. flour market controlled by General
Mills—but there was a cost. In return for pioneering the commercialization of B1 flour and enrichment
products, General Mills and Merck demanded exclusive rights, a monopoly concession. Unless a gov-
ernment edict mandated enrichment of all flour products, General Mills' negotiators argued, no com-
pany would be willing to take the first step without guaranteed exclusive rights that would allow it to
charge a premium price and recoup the costs of innovation. 23
Williams's collaborators warned against the deal. “The advantages of licensing some large food com-
pany are obvious, but such a situation is charged with fulminate of mercury,” Williams's boss at the Bell
Laboratories counseled. Not only would General Mills and Merck use their exclusive position to profit
outrageously from Williams's public-health research, they might not even deliver products to the coun-
try's neediest. “I have been plagued by a number of misgivings,” Williams wrote to an ally in the USDA.
“Perhaps the millers' genuine interest in the matter is limited to their specifically premium price flour;
perhaps they even contemplate using the vitamin primarily for incorporation in even higher price pack-
age goods and are merely talking flour for its moral effect on us.” If General Mills and Merck decided
to limit enrichment to top-shelf flours, Williams concluded, “[enriched] flour would go to consumers
who have a varied diet and less need for the vitamin restoration than to the consumers of the lower price
flours.”
A high-ranking FDA official friendly to Williams's cause concurred and raised the possibility of
government action: “If the large flour producers could not afford to put B1 in their flour for the un-
derprivileged, then possibly it should be a government function.” But in the end, the official backed a
more gradual model—not unlike the route taken by supporters of organic-labeled foods in the United
States today. He argued for enriching premium-priced products first, and then counting on the market
to provide for poor consumers later. Wealthy consumers would buy premium-priced flour and bread be-
cause they were more “susceptible to education.” This would, eventually, lower prices, raise awareness,
and “make itself felt among the lower income classes.”
Despite Williams's misgivings, Merck cut a deal with Standard Brands to produce enrichment tablets
for bakery use, and by 1940, General Mills was mass-marketing enriched flour. Profits boomed for
both companies, but Williams's fears proved prescient. After touring the country to promote enrichment
in 1941, he reflected sadly that millers and bakers who adopted enrichment did so almost exclusively
with an eye toward niche markets and premium charges. The American staple food had not been en-
riched—only a small luxury subset. As he complained in his diary, enrichment held sway only in the
country's “silk stocking districts,” and even there interest was waning. Enriched bread, like organic
arugula or patty pan squash, seemed destined to be an ephemerally trendy status item.