Header: Harvard MBA Theory Collides with Mac & Cheese Industry
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The Harvard MBA theory is from the late Prof. Clayton Christensen, called "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "Disruptive Innovation." (Wikipedia here and here). Wiki writes, "disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. In theory, disruptive innovation makes it hard for leading firms to stay at the top of their industry."
The prototypic case was 8" computer drive manufacturers who were undercut and then toppled by pesky little new 5" computer drive manufacturers.
Mac & Cheese industry?
Jesse Newman at WSJ writes a January 1, 2026 article about how Kraft Mac & Cheese is being invaded by upstart far small branders who are now chipping away at significant market shares. Multiple references about how Kraft, a giant incumbent, has been slow and uncertain in its responses.
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Kraft Heinz didn’t miss the rise of premium mac and cheese—it understood it clearly and responded rationally, which is exactly the problem Clayton Christensen warned about. By optimizing for scale, margins, and loyal legacy customers, the company delayed acting on a cultural shift in what “mac & cheese” means, allowing a small but differently framed entrant like Goodles to redefine value and quietly take share. This isn’t a story about noodles or cheese—it’s a reminder that disruption most often defeats incumbents not through ignorance, but through competence.
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The Wall Street Journal’s story about Kraft Mac & Cheese is basically The Innovator’s Dilemma rewritten in fluorescent orange powder. Kraft Heinz didn’t “miss” what was happening in the mac-and-cheese aisle; it saw it clearly—employees literally cooked the challenger product in a corporate kitchen, judged it “tasted good,” and still the company’s response drifted into years of deliberation about whether to add protein, new flavors, or “more cheese.” The Wall Street Journal That is Christensen’s central trap: an incumbent becomes so well tuned to what made it great—scale, consistency, a loyal base, a ruthlessly optimized cost structure—that it is structurally allergic to making the kind of awkward, margin-diluting, identity-shifting moves that a new entrant can make without asking permission.
Goodles is not “better Kraft” so much as “a different job to be done,” which is why it could start small and still matter. In the incumbent’s world, mac & cheese performance is measured by familiar axes—price, sameness, kid appeal, distribution, supply-chain reliability. In the entrant’s world, performance includes new dimensions: adult permission, ingredient virtue, protein-forward nutrition, and cultural signaling (“I eat comfort food, but I’m not a child and I’m not reckless”). The WSJ’s numbers show how a “small” reframing can scale quickly: Goodles reached about 6% of the U.S. market after arriving on shelves in 2022, while Kraft’s share fell to about 39% from roughly 45% in 2022 (per Circana). The Wall Street Journal In Christensen terms, that is disruption’s signature look: not an overnight collapse, but steady share erosion as the category’s definition of “good enough” quietly changes.
Kraft’s internal incentives make the slow response almost inevitable. When a single legacy SKU throws off roughly a billion dollars a year, “upgrading” it is not a product-development problem; it’s an enterprise-risk problem. The Wall Street Journal Any meaningful change threatens (1) the large installed base of loyal shoppers, (2) the finely tuned manufacturing and procurement machine, and (3) the financial predictability that leadership is rewarded for protecting. In the Christensen playbook, incumbents rarely underinvest because they’re irrational; they underinvest because their planning systems and performance metrics—volume, gross margin, operational stability—systematically punish the very experiments that create future growth.
Layer on Kraft Heinz’s post-merger history and the innovator’s dilemma becomes more severe. The WSJ describes years of cost cutting, underinvestment, and leadership turbulence that left the company vulnerable not only to premium upstarts but also to cheaper store-brand alternatives—an ugly pincer movement for a legacy “center aisle” empire. The Wall Street Journal This is classic “value network” pressure: when a category splits into premium-and-purpose on one end and private label on the other, the incumbent’s middle position can lose its natural home unless it actively redefines itself. In that environment, a culture optimized for efficiency can become a liability: you can ZBB your way to margin protection, but you can’t ZBB your way to relevance.
The mac-and-cheese episode also shows how incumbents misread the meaning of a challenger. The internal taste test verdict—Goodles is tasty, texture “iffy,” some flavors need work—sounds like a rational product critique. The Wall Street Journal But disruption often wins while being imperfect on the incumbent’s old scorecard, because it’s optimized for a different scorecard. Early disruptive offerings are frequently “worse” on traditional dimensions and still succeed because they are “better” on the new dimension the entrant is cultivating—here, health-forward positioning and modern brand energy, which the WSJ notes includes younger-consumer appeal and celebrity backing. The Wall Street Journal That’s why Christensen urged leaders to treat disruption as an organizational-design challenge, not merely an R&D challenge: if you judge the disruptor with incumbent criteria, you’ll always conclude it’s not worth a serious response—until it is.
Seen this way, the most important missed move wasn’t “why didn’t Kraft add more protein sooner?” It was “why didn’t Kraft create a structurally independent team that was allowed to win differently?” Christensen’s prescription was to build an autonomous unit with different economics and freedoms—different margin expectations, different packaging and brand voice, different channels, different consumer target—precisely because the core business cannot rationally cannibalize itself at speed. Instead, the incumbent tends to convene committees, run cautious tests, and search for a version of innovation that doesn’t disturb the core. The WSJ’s portrayal of prolonged internal deliberation reads like a case study of that instinct. The Wall Street Journal
What makes this particular story feel so “Christensen” is that the disruption is happening in a space that executives intuitively label as stable—shelf-stable comfort food—and the destabilizer isn’t a radical new technology so much as a new consumer definition of value. That is exactly the kind of shift that doesn’t show up early in quarterly dashboards. By the time it shows up as sustained share movement, two things are already true: (1) the challenger has learned faster because it has fewer constraints, and (2) the incumbent’s late response now has to be big enough to matter, which makes it politically and operationally harder. The WSJ notes Kraft Heinz is now signaling a renewed push, with leadership emphasizing the need to “meet the moment,” alongside broader corporate upheaval including a planned separation of the company and a CEO transition effective January 1, 2026. The Wall Street Journal+2Kraft Heinz Company News+2 That sort of organizational turbulence can either catalyze reinvention—or further slow it—because attention gets consumed by structure, governance, and internal uncertainty.
In short, the mac-and-cheese aisle is doing what disk drives and steel minimills did in the Christensen canon: it’s reminding us that incumbency is not mainly defeated by ignorance. It’s defeated by competence—competence at serving today’s customers, protecting today’s economics, and optimizing today’s machine. Kraft Heinz can absolutely make a better mac & cheese. The harder question is whether it can build (or buy, or incubate) a business that’s allowed to win in the new definition of “mac & cheese,” before that definition becomes the only one that matters.
