(FORTUNE Magazine) – BIG FOOD-PROCESSING companies guard their technical secrets with all the zeal of defense contractors. Last year, after Keebler, Nabisco, and Frito-Lay marketed cookies that were crisp on the outside and soft at the center, lawyers for Procter & Gamble marched into court to accuse them of infringing P&G's patents. The competitors deny the charge; the suit is pending, and no trial date has been set. But one thing is clear: P&G and its rivals were all hoping to pull off a bit of legerdemain by using the fruits of newfangled industrial research to make people think they were eating old-fashioned cookies as good as Mother used to make. Because the commercial stakes are high, many of the 22,000 professionals who belong to the Institute of Food Technologists toil in hush-hush conditions worthy of Star Wars research. The science of preparing, preserving, and reshaping packaged food is a bigger business today than ever: food-related companies and the government allotted some $1 billion to research and % development last year. General Foods, the biggest private spender, accounted for $115 million. Food technology owes a lot of its current importance to the growing health craze and the increasing numbers of two-career and single-adult households, which demand high-quality food that can be prepared simply and quickly. In addition, processors want food that doesn't spoil rapidly; distributing a product nationally takes so long that any packaged food made in one place and sold throughout the U.S. has to have a long shelf life. For meat products, it's a minimum of about four to eight weeks; for frozen foods, six months. It's the food technologists' job to reconcile the conflicting demands for food that's nutritious, tasty, fresh, convenient, and resistant to spoilage. An example of the trade-off problem: canned orange juice is easy to use and has at least a six-month shelf life, says David Erickson of Technomic Consultants, an Illinois-based firm that works with the food industry. But the juice is bland, he says, because it's either cooked in cans or poured into them at near-boiling temperature in order to sterilize them. ''Excessive treatment has been routine,'' says Harry C. Mussman, executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association, a trade group in Washington, D.C. ''But as palates have become more educated, everyone in the industry is trying to bring foods to the public like the ones you'd get from the garden or cooked from scratch.'' Among the products and processes designed to meet these needs are convenience foods that can be prepared quickly in a toaster or microwave oven; substitutes for salt, fat, and sugar; cold-pasteurization techniques like irradiation; the use of carbon monoxide to preserve beef without discoloration; the ''restructuring'' of irregular pieces of beef to make them look more like porterhouse than hamburger; and a technology that could virtually eliminate the need to refrigerate chocolate and other fat-based foods. While much of the food industry's R&D money goes to increase the efficiency of huge, sophisticated production lines, a lot is devoted to developing new products and adapting them to the appliances in the family kitchen -- the toaster, the refrigerator, and especially the microwave oven. Processing techniques that consumers take for granted are often more complex than they seem. Frozen foods, for example, present several problems. Keeping ingredients from separating in General Foods' Jell-O Pudding Pops requires a patented way of using emulsifiers to control ice crystal formation and maintain a creamy texture. Moreover, no frozen food is really completely frozen. Dissolved sugars, starches, salts, and fats reduce the freezing point of water in parts of the food to below the temperature of most freezer compartments. Though it moves at a glacial pace, the water is still liquid -- so flavors gradually migrate and textures slowly change. That's why something thawed six days after freezing tastes better than it would if thawed six months later. Pillsbury had to meet a surprising number of technical challenges when it set out in 1980 to tap into the $120-million-a-year toaster pastry market with a frozen strudel that could be cooked in a toaster. Pillsbury found the ordinary toaster no cinch to work with. For the consumer's convenience, the precooked strudel had to go directly from the freezer to the toaster for heating. The solid filling had to be warmed quickly, something toasters aren't designed to do. And if the product is too heavy, the toaster won't pop it up when it's done. After tests on 2,000 different toasters, the Pillsbury scientists decided on a strudel weighing 1.8 ounces. NEXT CAME the complicated task of outfitting a plant to make it. The Toaster Strudel production line at Pillsbury's plant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is 1 1/2 miles long and includes eight stages of processing that take one hour all together. It makes 2,000 strudels a minute, a volume that allows Pillsbury to get the retail price down to $1.49 for a package of six. ''If you had a strudel that costs three times as much,'' says John Dixon, Pillsbury's vice president of research and development, ''you'd have a nonproduct.'' The result of all this technical fuss and finesse? The strudel, introduced nationally this year, is one of the company's most successful new products and is expected to ring up a total of over $35 million in first-year sales. Adapting products to the microwave oven is an even hotter field of research. At least half of America's 86 million households now have a microwave oven, and the proportion could reach 70% by 1990. Unlike conventional heat, which dehydrates the surface of food and cooks from the outside in, microwave energy cooks from the inside out, releasing moisture and turning the oven into a mini-steambath. As a consequence, many foods developed for the microwave are soggy, like lasagna. People want more texture, especially crispness, but it's ) hard to make food cooked in a microwave go crunch. Such exotica as microwave tempura may well be impossible. Nonetheless, food companies are trying, if not with tempura then with breading for, say, chicken. Clorox Co., the laundry-bleach maker, has patented a coating mixture it says has an ''affinity'' for microwave energy. The mixture, which includes such unlikely sounding ingredients as potassium acetate, potassium chloride, and potassium bicarbonate, gets hotter than the food it coats and turns crisp. Clorox has yet to introduce products using the mixture, and won't say why. Dow Chemical has developed food gums that form a gel barrier between the batter and the food they coat. The gel is designed to keep moisture in, dehydrating the batter. When the food cools, the gel barrier softens and becomes more palatable. Richard Rakowski, president of Princeton Technologies, a food-consulting firm in Glen Rock, New Jersey, thinks most of these products haven't really resolved the crispiness crisis. ''They're ersatz crispy,'' he says. ''They're unquestionably not soft, but they're missing the crunch.'' An exception: Pillsbury's microwave pizza, already on the market, which takes an innovative packaging approach to the problem. Pillsbury adds crunch by prefrying the crust and attaching an ingenious hot plate called a susceptor, made of metalized polyester film, to the bottom of the pizza box. The consumer takes the pizza out of the box and puts it in the oven on top of the inverted box; the film beneath the pizza heats the crust by conventional conduction to a crispy 435 degrees F. Technologists are also working hard on substitutes for ingredients that taste good but can have unhealthy consequences. The sodium in common table salt can contribute to high blood pressure. The most common alternative is bitter- tasting potassium chloride, which comes from a chemical family similar to that of regular salt (sodium chloride). The problem with salt substitutes is that nothing yet discovered tastes like salt except salt. By contrast, people perceive a wider range of substances as sweet, notes Michael O'Mahony, a food scientist at the University of California at Davis; sugar substitutes include saccharin, aspartame, and a mirror-image form of sugar that isn't fattening because digestive enzymes can't break it down (FORTUNE, December 9). RESEARCHERS AT Hiroshima University led by Hideo Okai, a professor of fermentation technology, claim that two naturally occurring amino acids, . ornithine and taurine, have a salty taste when combined. But the scientists haven't tested the compound for safety, and it may lose its savor after a day or so in such slightly acidic solutions as fruit juices. (They declined to provide FORTUNE with a sample.) Many food companies are doing long-term research on a salt substitute -- among them Campbell Soup, which uses lots of salt. A high-quality natural salt substitute, says James R. Kirk, vice president for research and development at Campbell, would be a ''motherhood and apple pie product.'' Another seemingly irresistible product would be a no-fat fat that could be used in substitutes for butter, salad oil, mayonnaise, and cooking oils. It would eliminate weight gain from eating fats and cut consumption of cholesterol, which accumulates as fatty plaque deposits in the circulatory system and causes arteriosclerosis. Procter & Gamble has been working for more than a decade on a fat substitute called sucrose polyester. SPE, as it's known, contains eight fatty acids instead of the three in ordinary fat; that makes SPE too tough for the digestive enzymes to break down, so it appears to pass out of the body without being metabolized. In a paper published this year, researchers at the University of Cincinnati reported that 13 obese patients with high blood cholesterol levels were given SPE in the form of a margarine-like bread spread and a mayonnaise-like salad dressing. They lost weight and lowered their blood cholesterol by 15%, more than twice the amount observed in two other groups that weren't given SPE but also followed low-calorie, low-saturated-fat, low-cholesterol diets. So far the Food and Drug Administration has not approved SPE for general use. Food technologists aren't looking for fat substitutes for health reasons alone. Because most fats begin to melt at room temperature, they must be refrigerated. A chocolate bar, which is 35% fat, turns into goo on a hot summer's day. Gilbert Finkel, a technologist, has developed a way to modify fats so they don't need refrigeration and don't melt even at high temperatures -- yet still liquefy in the mouth. Using this modified fat in chocolate results in candy that keeps its shape up to 400 degrees F, around the point at which sugar caramelizes, instead of 91 degrees, at which ordinary chocolate melts. Finkel, founder of Food Tek Inc., a contract research laboratory in East Hanover, New Jersey, invented the process. It uses two to five additives in different applications, but he doesn't fully understand how it works. He speculates that the structure of his modified fat resembles a honeycomb that keeps its shape at high heat; inside the honeycomb, however, the fat is liquid. In the mouth, chewing and saliva break down the honeycomb. Besides eliminating refrigeration, the additives retard ''bloom,'' the whitening that occurs as chocolate ages and fat migrates to the surface and hardens. Finkel's additives may also be useful in the cosmetics industry for producing nonsmear makeup. Finkel has a patent pending; he doesn't need FDA approval, since the FDA has already cleared the additives he uses. He says several major food companies have expressed interest in licensing the technology. Finkel estimates that the potential market could easily exceed several hundred million dollars. SOLVING ONE PROBLEM can create others. Because aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar, it takes only 1/200 as much to produce the same sensation of sweetness. In diet baked goods it's necessary to replace the lost volume with a bulking agent; polydextrose, a low-calorie agent made by Pfizer from corn sugar and approved by the FDA in 1981, is now showing up in many diet products. Sweet Victory, a New York City company that plans to go national with its reduced-calorie desserts, uses polydextrose in 75 frozen dairy products, popcorn, cakes, and biscuits. Another chore for food technologists -- preserving food by slowing down or stopping the growth of microbes -- has enormous commercial importance. Many processed foods are bland because they are heated past the boiling point to kill dangerous microorganisms. A cold-pasteurization technique would make preserved food taste better. So-called aseptic packaging, employing hydrogen peroxide to disinfect the package and more heat for a substantially shorter time than traditional canning, is now widely used for those fruit drinks in squat paper boxes. Some food technologists advocate irradiating food with low doses of gamma rays to kill microorganisms. Little if any heat is applied to the food, so flavors remain intact, and the process can extend shelf life significantly. So far the FDA has approved only limited use, principally with spices. Because the technique employs radiation, even some supporters of it have called for labeling that indicates irradiation has been used. A similar preservation method, pulsed power, is in the early stages of research. Maxwell Laboratories, a San Diego company that specializes in pulsed-power applications, is experimenting with using electricity at tens of thousands of volts in bursts as brief as millionths of a second to kill bacteria that shorten the shelf life of a wide variety of foods. The company is also investigating ways to use pulsed electromagnetic fields to do the same thing. How to preserve beef without changing its color has long vexed the food industry. Beef and other foods spoil on extended contact with oxygen in the air, which encourages the growth of some microorganisms. When meat is transported in refrigerated trucks, one common technique is to replace some of the air with carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide stops microbial growth but turns the meat gray, so the beef must then be trimmed to make it look appetizing. TransFresh Corp., a Salinas, California, company specializing in controlled-atmosphere transportation of beef, vegetables, and other perishables, has patented a method of adding carbon monoxide to the carbon dioxide. Carbon monoxide doesn't change the color of beef, and TransFresh says that the trace amounts used -- which never exceed 5,000 parts per million -- are harmless. The company has applied for FDA approval, but doesn't have it yet. The beef market is sizable: sales in supermarkets last year were $21.4 billion. Food processors are sure to welcome any innovation that lets them charge more for something they sell already. Glenn Schmidt, a meat scientist at Colorado State University, has found a way to assemble beef pieces so they stay intact at ordinary temperatures, unlike other so-called restructured beef, which won't hold together long unless it's frozen. Schmidt's beef thus can be sold as fresh in the supermarket meat case. Using lactic acid (found in muscle), sodium alginate (from kelp), and calcium carbonate (from limestone) as binders, irregularly shaped pieces of meat -- from the beef shoulder, for example -- that would otherwise be turned into ground beef can be reshaped into a rib-steak-like slab. The result is a more profitable product. All this technical wizardry has its limits, to be sure, as General Foods found to its chagrin. In the mid-1970s the giant food company, now a unit of Philip Morris, introduced Lean Strips when bacon prices were skyhigh -- and so was concern over its fat content. Lean Strips were a technological tour de force, an inexpensive, no-cholesterol bacon substitute made principally from soy protein and natural and artificial flavorings. ''It was tough making vegetable protein act like animal protein,'' recalls Al Clausi, senior vice president for research at General Foods. It was even tougher persuading consumers that it tasted like bacon. General Foods estimates it lost several million dollars on Lean Strips. Pillsbury was similarly burned some years ago by ''space food sticks,'' a high-protein meal originally designed for astronauts. Sales tapered off, says Jay Morgan, a Pillsbury research and development official, because ''the bottom line was it's not real food.'' But in the age of nonsugar sweeteners, nonbutter spreads, and nondairy creamers, what is ''real'' food anyway?