Apparently, thread the needle with kitchen twine. Around this time last year, Kraft took an extraordinary gamble with one of its most beloved foodstuffs—the iconic blue box of Mac & Cheese. After several years, Kraft replaced its classic recipe, laden with its fair share of artificial dyes and preservatives, with a new version. To replicate the taste and color of those increasingly unpopular synthetic ingredients, the company incorporated more familiar substitutes, such as paprika, annatto, and turmeric. But, despite all this work, Kraft didn’t publicly announce the change.

In March, after waiting three months (and selling 50 million boxes), the company finally came clean in a series of ads. The grand reveal had a built-in taunt: that seemingly no one had noticed a difference became part of the campaign. “Our first advice to them was not to tell anyone about it, which is unusual for an ad agency,” one marketing executive involved in the campaign told The New York Times. “We’re going to focus on the fact that things are still the same.”

While plenty of food manufacturers have made a show of removing artificial ingredients from their products, Kraft’s ambivalence about broadcasting its revamped mac and cheese was both strategic and cautious. After all, as the minds behind sugarless Haribo gummy bears or New Coke can attest, tinkering with the formula of a treasured entity can be damaging, particularly if consumers are primed to detect a difference. And though Kraft’s gambit may have satisfied those who collectively made artificial color the third-biggest consumer concern in a 2014 Nielsen global food survey, Kraft mac and cheese is still not terribly healthy. The new blue box still bears the exact same nutritional data, including 1,710 milligrams of sodium, nearly 75 percent of the recommended daily intake.

As I noted back in October, the quest to formally determine what makes something “healthy” and “natural” has beguiled food manufacturers, federal regulators, and consumers alike. (It’s also set off a spate of class-action lawsuits in recent years.) In lieu of comprehensive definitions and in a nod to what consumers increasingly say they want, many food manufacturers have started producing more wholesome (or wholesome-seeming) offerings that go beyond removing objectionable ingredients and actually reduce calories, sodium, and sugar contents.

But the results, in terms of sales, have been mixed. For example, take PepsiCo, whose efforts to diversify its snacking fare beyond Doritos, Cheetos, and sugary drinks were the focus of a recent Wall Street Journal examination. “Despite an expanding stable of ‘good for you’ brands like Quaker oatmeal, Naked juice and Sabra hummus, PepsiCo Inc. fell behind the goal it made in 2010 to triple revenue from nutritious products to $30 billion this decade,” wrote Mike Esterl, a Journal reporter. “Its new 2025 goal, announced in October, is that sales growth of its nutritious products ‘will outpace’ the rest of its portfolio.”