SAYS ZANNA MCFERSON, plucking a stevia leaf from a plant on her desk and biting into it, “I knew there had to be something we could do with it.” Through the expansive windows of her corner office at Cargill’s headquarters, an Aspen-like mega-lodge on the outskirts of suburban Minneapolis, she stares out at the snowy pines and at the horizon beyond. McFerson chews, swallows, and smiles. “It’s definitely nice to see the light,” she says.
That’s because McFerson is one of several Cargill employees who spent three years secluded in the company basement, in rooms with blacked-out windows, using code names — including “Lancelot” and “Cobalt” — to mask their project: determining how to push the little-known plant into a bold new market. As Cargill’s first-ever director of so-called high-intensity, or diet, sweeteners, McFerson was charged with creating a product that could go head-to-head with giants Sweet’N Low, Splenda, and Equal. With most Americans overweight and many focused on the origins of their food, Cargill believed there was a wide-open opportunity for a plant-based sugar substitute.
Cargill, the privately held $108-billion-a-year behemoth, has stakes in almost every corner of the food industry. It helps grow and distribute grains and other crops; it supplies food and beverage companies with ingredients; it helps agricultural firms with commodity risk management. In 2004, when McFerson set out on her mission, Cargill was not a player in the no-calorie-sweetener business — it had never even competed. (In fact, the company generally doesn’t sell its own products straight to shoppers; that would mean competing with the food manufacturers it supplies.) Four years later, McFerson unveiled what has become a golden egg for the company: Truvia, the world’s first widely available no-calorie sugar substitute that originates from a plant. With its cute green packets, Truvia has already stolen 12% of the U.S. market for tabletop sweeteners from its pink, yellow, and blue competitors, making it just the fourth diet sweetener to gain widespread acceptance in the last half-century. But its potential market is even bigger.
