American bread-makers say 96 ingredients are off-limits — and they call that "clean food"

Take a look at what you're "not" supposed to eat.

"In fact, they can work out what they're eating without a food scientist, a dictionary, or a Google search."

Open the menu today at Panera Bread, the bakery-café chain with 2,024 locations across North America, and you will have no trouble reading the ingredient descriptions. No complicated-looking chemical names like carboxymethyl cellulose or propylene glycol alginate.

In June 2014, Panera Bread promised that by 2016 every product would be made with "clean ingredients" — defined at the time as ingredients you could understand without a dictionary. In May 2015, Panera Bread published a No No List, formally naming 96 ingredients it decided customers should not be eating. At the end of January this year, it finally made good on the promise.

"Understandable without a dictionary" is a blunt standard. Panera Bread's list includes artificial trans fat, which the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has explicitly called unsafe, and it also includes ingredients with no proven harm that many consumers dislike anyway, such as aspartame. In short, think of it as covering the chemical ingredients used in food processing.

But with health in fashion and consumers pushing back, nearly every large food company has spent the past few years rewriting recipes to strip out the ingredients shoppers object to. Every few weeks brings another subtraction: Nissin dropped artificial colors, General Mills dropped artificial colors and artificial sweeteners, Hershey's dropped high-fructose corn syrup, Kraft dropped artificial colors.

Panera Bread, though, was the first restaurant chain to publish an explicit list and then live up to it. Keeping the promise meant adjusting 122 recipes and negotiating production changes with more than 300 suppliers.

That probably makes it the most transparent thing any food company has done on this front. Panera Bread is betting on the clean-recipe trend, and its CEO, Ron Shaich, said: "When I was hired as CEO, Panera's leadership was tasked with figuring out where the world was going for our customers in the next two to five years, and making sure Panera was there when it arrived. They didn't hire us to react to the past."

Call it Ron Shaich's confidence; it is also plainly a move with the tide. Consumers, millennials above all, care more and more about their health and about what exactly they are eating — QDaily has written about this many times. In a 2014 report, the consulting firm NPD Group found that 48.3% of Americans said they "often check food labels to make sure the food I buy doesn't contain ingredients I object to."

Once a health-conscious shopper hears that some ingredient might cause disease — no matter how credible the claim — they will often avoid it anyway, to push their own risk of getting sick down to zero.

Consumption trends used to be set by big companies. Now the companies work to make you feel that you are the one deciding what to eat. So what a food company cares about most is not whether an ingredient is harmful but what its customers think of it. When these companies announce a new recipe, the reason they give is usually that they heard consumers — that a lot of people asked for an ingredient to go. In 2015, Mars refused to take artificial colors out of its recipes, saying they were safe; after 200,000 consumers signed a petition, Mars promised to remove them.

Panera Bread sells food billed as more natural, more organic, healthier-looking. Read its No No List closely and a lot of the ingredients will look familiar. We picked a few to explain: where they came from, and why they are now being cast aside.

The margarine that goes into so much bread

In 1871, the French scientist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès sold the margarine he had invented two years earlier to the Dutch company Jurgens (later bought by Unilever). Jurgens dyed the grayish-white margarine yellow with artificial coloring and, through the 1870s, pushed the new product into markets around the world, the United States included.

The American dairy industry naturally hated the thing that was stealing its business. It lobbied state after state, and many state governments ended up taxing margarine makers heavily or banning margarine outright. By 1902, 32 states required margarine to be dyed some color other than yellow, to warn consumers what they were buying.

Like consumers today, many people then assumed anything artificial was worse than the natural thing, and so they boycotted butter. Lucius Hubbard, the governor of Minnesota, said he was dismayed that "the ingenuity of a degenerate human genius has reached its culmination in the manufacture of butter and similar products."

None of that stopped it. Shortages during World War II meant margarine quickly took the place of scarce butter and moved into many American kitchens.

Then, starting in the 1950s, deaths from heart disease in the United States climbed sharply, many medical experts blamed saturated fat, and the fear spread across the country. Margarine makers changed how they produced it and advertised loudly that they used hydrogenated vegetable oil rather than animal fat — that is, that their products contained unsaturated fat.

Sales rose fast after that. By the 1970s, the average American was eating about 10 pounds (roughly 4.54 kilograms) of margarine a year.

In the 1990s, however, several academic studies found that the trans fat in hydrogenated vegetable oil raised the risk of heart disease — meaning eating margarine actually made heart disease more likely.

As the findings piled up, consumers and food companies dropped margarine just as quickly and went back to ordinary butter. By 2014, the average American was eating 5.6 pounds of butter a year, and only 3.5 pounds of margarine.

The sweetener Panera Bread wants its soda supplier, Pepsi, to drop

Plenty of sweeteners have fallen out of favor: aspartame, artificial sweeteners, high-fructose corn syrup, stevia, refined sugar and more.

High-fructose corn syrup grew steadily less popular after a 2004 study suggested it might be linked to obesity. There is no conclusive evidence for that, yet a 2008 survey found 58% of Americans considered high-fructose corn syrup the No. 1 threat to food safety.

Panera Bread said in 2015 that it was talking to Pepsi about sweeteners: it wanted substitutes for Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew and Sierra Mist, all of which are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. Pepsi said at the time that it was exploring other options with Panera Bread, but would not comment on high-fructose corn syrup itself.

Ordinary Pepsi is still on sale in Panera Bread stores today, so the two of them clearly have not found a suitable replacement.

High-fructose corn syrup is not the only sweetener on the No No List.

Aspartame has been under suspicion ever since it was developed in 1965. In the 1990s, a study suggested it might cause brain cancer. In 2014, a paper in Nature argued that artificial sweeteners, aspartame among them, might change the human gut microbiome and raise the risk of diabetes and other diseases.

The American food industry had nonetheless been using aspartame since the 1980s. Coca-Cola started developing an aspartame-sweetened Diet Coke before the FDA had even approved the ingredient.

Government agencies in the United States and Europe have confirmed aspartame's safety again and again. The European Food Safety Authority ruled out in 2013 any link between aspartame and genetic damage or cancer. The FDA's page on aspartame carries this line: "Aspartame is one of the most thoroughly studied substances in the human food supply, with more than 100 studies supporting its safety."

Official backing has not settled consumers' doubts. One reason Americans drink less diet soda is that they do not trust aspartame; a survey last March by the International Food Information Council found that 37% of Americans avoid it.

So in April 2015 Pepsi switched the sweetener in Diet Pepsi in North America from aspartame to sucralose — and a year later, after customers complained, brought the aspartame version back.

The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Diabetes Association (ADA) have also said in statements that people should use artificial sweeteners with care, because they may lead to heart problems — only one of the concerns attached to them.

The synthetic additives that meet the "you'd need a dictionary" standard

Americans were already hearing arguments about the dangers of additives in the early 20th century. As Fear of Food tells it, American "journalists began relentlessly exposing how unscrupulous food producers used chemicals rumored to be dangerous to preserve food, and used chemical deodorizers to mask the smell of rotten eggs."

Harvey W. Wiley, who took over the US Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry in 1883, helped bring about the Pure Food and Drug Act, which put additives and drugs under one set of rules. Throughout his tenure he warned the public about chemical additives.

Wiley believed preservatives such as borax, boric acid, salicylic acid, sulfur dioxide and sodium benzoate built up in the body and damaged the kidneys, causing "widespread indigestion and a sharp rise in kidney disease." He also argued that the alum used to process pickles caused indigestion, and that caffeine was addictive.

The FDA banned three of those — borax, boric acid and salicylic acid — as food additives long ago; every other ingredient on Wiley's list turns up on the No No List. The FDA's own position is that as long as its limits on how and how much these additives are used are followed strictly, they are safe in food.

As with many ingredients, the question is not whether experimental data shows them to be safe. What matters most to Panera Bread and other food companies is what customers think of them, and consumers are always suspicious of complicated synthetic compounds. According to a report the consulting firm Nielsen published last year, 62% of consumers worldwide try to avoid artificial sweeteners, 62% avoid preservatives and 61% avoid artificial colors.

Now that the reformulation is done, what bothers Panera Bread is something else: other food companies are also selling "clean food," yet the industry has no clear definition of "clean" at all. Shaich argues that a chain deciding to drop a few artificial additives is "better than nothing," but that a half-measure drains the word "clean" of its value.

As for what the new recipes cost, Panera Bread said its expenses went up, but "our prices haven't outpaced inflation."

A small increase probably will not scare off its customers. Shaich has said plainly that the chain aims at the slice of the market that "wants food that's good for them and tastes good, too," adding, "Panera is not a place for the common man, or for everyone."

Those customers will probably pay a little more for the new recipes. After all, it looks very lifestyle.

Cover image: Panera Bread, Fortune