WHAT SHAPE IS YOUR NOODLE?

In Mac-and-Cheese Wars, Al Dente Can't Compete With SpongeBob SquarePants

It May Sound Cheesy, but at Kraft, Noodling Around With Novel Shapes Is Key; the Hot-Water Test

GLENVIEW, Ill.—In architecture, form follows function. In pasta, shape follows sauce. Margherite, farfalle and lumache may look like daisies, butterflies and snails, but taste is what counts: which shape combines with which sauce to taste best.

It counts in Italy, that is. In America, the rule has evolved a variation: Shape follows tie-in. That's why macaroni from Kraft Foods looks like Super Mario, Spider-Man and Marvin the Martian—and why Guillermo Haro is the nation's best-selling pasta architect. (CLICK BELOW TO READ MORE)

Mr. Haro (he is from Mexico, not Italy) was in Kraft's research-and-development center here a while ago, crouching among the hoses and gauges of a rackety pilot pasta plant.

"It's like a big Play-Doh machine," he said, watching a tube of flour-and-water paste extrude from a brass pasta die. A spinning blade sliced the tube into half-inch chunks that fell into a bucket. He reached in and brought up a handful, each one a Disney character in minimalist form. "We're making Phineas and Ferb," he said.

In 22 years at Kraft, Mr. Haro, who is cagey about his age, has extruded pasta into more than 2,000 shapes; 280 have gone on sale in blue boxes of Macaroni and Cheese, with a bag of orange cheesy stuff.

Aside from licensed homages to Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo and the rest—and the donkeys and elephants handed out at party conventions—his original works have been awarded 29 patents, among them:

High-rise-building shaped pasta, locomotive-shaped pasta, dinosaur-shaped pasta, spider-shaped pasta, and United States of America-shaped pasta.

It may horrify those who summer in Tuscany, but U.S. dry-pasta consumption—a billion pounds a year—is equaled by "dry dinners" for the busy and the budget-minded, like boxed mac-and-cheese. Kraft got into the game in 1937, and sells a million mac-and-cheese boxes a day. But to stay in front, it must pull in young new eaters, and that means continually refreshing its cartoon-pasta output.

Which is why Mr. Haro's "role is critical," says Noelle O'Mara, Kraft's brand manager, who adds: "It's very hard to get SpongeBob SquarePants to look right when he's made out of a noodle."

A half-hour drive from Kraft, and a world away, is the U.S. office of Barilla, the Italian pasta giant, founded in 1877. Framed fiori and rigatoni line the hall to its test kitchen, where Lorenzo Boni, executive chef, was busy one morning making macaroni salad.

"Appearance must never compromise taste," he said, spooning some onto a plate. While all Italian pasta is made of the same raw material, he explained, gradations of thickness, texture and "sauce absorption" make all the difference. "Look at these elbows," said Mr. Boni. "See how the dressing clings."

Barilla isn't against new shapes. Automobile designer Giorgetto Giugiaro once made a double-tube in the form of an "8" for the company; it took ages to cook and flopped, like his DeLorean. But the chef's salad's finely ridged elbows, made of hard duram wheat, were born in the U.S. as a winning reply to Kraft's mushier mix of softer flour. Not that Barilla sells them with a cheese bag.

"I've been exposed to macaroni and cheese," said Mr. Boni. "It's a different approach." Presented with a sprinkling of SpongeBobs, he picked one up to admire it. "Very complex," he said. "Obviously, it would appeal to an element of the population."

Kraft discovered as much in 1989, when it brought out saxophone macaroni. CPC, a competitor since digested by other competitors, quickly filed a number of spoiler pasta patents: astronauts, vampires, bongo-drums, boom-boxes. The macaroni wars haven't let up since.

Annie's, maker of Bunny Pasta with Yummy Cheese, has just gone public. The Pasta Shoppe, a Nashville mill, sells pasta shaped like crabs, the Star of David, and 65 college mascots. Dozens more brands vie for shelf space, but Kraft's are the superheroes to defeat.

"Kraft is concerned with aesthetics," says Ian Golder, a videogame editor whose mac-and-cheese box collection is up on the Web. On a visit to Rome's Pasta Museum, Mr. Golder was "stunned by the variety," but "Kraft's variety," he says, "is also stunning. They're ahead of everybody in making pasta look like cartoon characters."

Back at Kraft's pilot plant, Mr. Haro was prepared to discuss his technique, while his boss, Ricardo Villota, stood by to keep him from spilling trade secrets.

"If I can put it on paper, I can imagine how it'll end up in a box," said Mr. Haro, opening a guide to Spider-Man poses: crouching, leaping, dangling. "You choose the ones that are easy for pasta."

He draws pencil sketches, knowing that all lines must connect, and not be too thick or thin. "You get carried away with detail," he said. Mr. Haro was about to tell how he employs stubby lines to suggest eyeballs when Mr. Villota said, "Watch it!" and cut him off.

Moving to a computer, Mr. Haro showed how he had perfected a Ferb likeness, which he sent to De Mari Pasta Dies in Dracut, Mass. De Mari cast a die, from which Mr. Haro made a Ferb prototype, which he then sent to Disney for the ultimate noodle test: hot water.

"They want it to look like they want it to look, before it's cooked and after it's cooked," Mr. Haro said on his way downstairs to Kraft's test kitchen. "Right up to launch day, you're nervous."

More than almost anything, what separates pasta design from ordinary architecture is that the structure, in use, grows to three times its dry weight. Growth must be perfectly uniform to preserve on-plate identity. Also, there's the matter of the cheese.

A Kraft chef had a pot of Phineas and Ferb on the boil when Mr. Haro walked into the kitchen. (Like all thicker pasta, it takes longer to cook.) While his art works bubbled, he said, "In the lab, we eat mac and cheese 20 times a week. It was exciting in the beginning. A kid once asked me to autograph a box."

He drained the pasta. The chef dumped in the cheese powder. Mr. Haro stirred. To an untrained eye, the pot's contents turned into a glob of orange glops. Mr. Haro—like a lot of kids—knew better.

He lifted a piece of cheesy pasta with a fork, said, "This is Phineas," and ate it. "And here's Ferb," said Mr. Haro, raising one more piece to his lips. He said, "Now Ferb's gone," and swallowed.