David Edwards teaches at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In this excerpt from his book, The Lab: Creativity and Culture he writes about creating a “food inhaler” that dispenses breathable chocolate.

Thierry Marx was helping transform how we enjoy the purely aesthetic realm of eating. Each year, in the town of Pauillac, north of Bordeaux, within the chateau of Cordeillan-Bages, he created hundreds of new ways to prepare, visualize, and consume familiar foods. By 2007 the reputation of his restaurant drew comparisons with the two top experimental restaurants in the world, Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli outside Barcelona and Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck north of London.

That same year we had a chance to involve Thierry in an experiment at Le Laboratoire with the colloid physicist Jérôme Bibette. To explore how a chef became an exhibiting artist, we traveled down to his restaurant in July. The conversation swirled that day around wrapping flavor in particularly thin membranes. Having looked into the idea of inhaled aerosols for delivering drugs and vaccines, I brought up the idea of breathing these colloids into your mouth. Later in the fall I shared that notion with students at Harvard University. They would need to make the food particles small enough to get into the air, and large enough to avoid entry into the lungs under all conditions of breathing. We knew this much. But what did inhaling food mean? Would there be pleasure in it? After a semester of reflection, brainstorming, and quite a bit of coughing (even after designing the particles with a size to avoid the lungs, we discovered that, no matter how we breathed through straw-like inhalers, the particles flew to the back of the throat) I put a piece of tape over the paper cylinder my students had prepared to inhale things like carrot powder. The coughing stopped. And here we had the first prototype of the food inhaler we called Le Whif.

The LaboGroup was just then being formed,
and José Sanchez decided we could manufacture Le Whif in the
Chinese factory where we planned to make the plant filter. Six
months after the idea had come up in Thierry’s restaurant, we
manufactured the first Whifs in China. They arrived in Paris a
few days before Thierry and Jérôme’s culinary art exhibition at
Le Laboratoire, in March 2008. We exhibited our fledgling
product over a Whif Bar imagined by Caroline Naphegyi and
cosponsored by the Nestlé division Nespresso. Nespresso offered
each visitor a free coffee, and we included a little brown
object that looked like a tube of lipstick, by which you
whiffed chocolate into your mouth.

To be
perfectly frank, Le Whif didn’t work well. Chocolate powder
fell out if you inclined one end above the other, and you
almost invariably coughed when you inhaled for the first time.
But this was a lab, and we were testing a new idea–a new way
of experiencing food! Two Harvard students, Trevor Martin and
Larissa Zhou, had flown to Paris for the event. Jonathan
Kamler, who had graduated the year before, having led the
previous semester’s student whiffing project, was also in Paris
to work full-time for the LaboGroup. These three kept the
chocolate inhalers full of chocolate powder as several hundred
opening night guests tried it out.

It
turned out to be fortuitous that, just weeks before the
exhibition, the French government had outlawed cigarettes in
cafés. This had outraged many French café-goers. Le Whif seemed
a kind of inventive response. The traditional sip of coffee,
bit of chocolate, and smoke that properly ended a French meal
became, in this new anti-cigarette era, sipped coffee and
smoked chocolate. Our guests had a ball with it. They
invariably held Le Whif between their fingers as if it were a
cigarette, and kept it long after the tube was empty, chatting,
appreciating a novel social experience (which became, in the
hands of my three little boys, something of a slightly illicit
thrill).

No, this wasn’t a commercial
product, and nobody pretended it was. Nobody, that is, but the
LaboGroup team. Why? Because the team was having fun. The
hoped-for outcome of this first experiment had been observed in
the public reaction to the exhibition, and now there were more
experiments to be done. And, besides, if Le Whif did manage to
become a product one day, magical revenues would appear. The
team needed to hope for this income stream. The risk of running
out of money was too palpable.

True,
whiffing was even more far-fetched than filtering the air with
plants. However, being far-fetched made the idea plausible as
the preoccupation of an art lab, and commended the idea as a
valid creative process even as it cast doubt on the eventual
outcome of a valuable commercial product.

Clearly there were
things to improve. The design needed to prevent all the
chocolate from spilling out as you moved Le Whif around after
filling it and before inhaling. But the product needed to
remain simple; especially, it needed to avoid the unattractive
trappings of pharmaceutical products. Le Whif needed to
reliably deliver enough chocolate to satisfy taste but not so
much as to fill your mouth with dry powder or provoke a spasm
of coughing. The LaboGroup launched a second version of Le Whif
in the fall of 2008 with the opening of the new LaboShop. The
public could come inside and enjoy a whiff of chocolate with a
cup of espresso. Whiffed chocolate came in mint chocolate,
raspberry chocolate, and pure chocolate flavors. We invited the
public to opine on the result and help us design a fully
commercial chocolate inhaler that we would launch within the
year.

We said that whiffing was a new way
of eating, and proposed Le Whif as a kind of inhaled fork or
spoon–and we believed it. Until now, nobody had reliably put
food in the mouth through breathing. First there were the
hands, then chopsticks, then forks and spoons, and now Le Whif.
Yes, we were starting with chocolate, but you could inhale many
other things, too, as we did during private evenings of
experimentation in the FoodLab–with cheese, mushroom, exotic
teas.

From the fall of 2008 into the winter
of 2009, our local LaboShop clientele included young
professionals, kids, and an occasional celebrity, like the
French actress Isabelle Adjani, who would sneak in and out,
sunglasses donned, enjoying a private pleasure. This eclectic
group, probably fewer than a hundred people, returned regularly
to the LaboShop, defining for us the commercial potential of Le
Whif and rarely leaving before posing the same impatient
question: When could they actually buy Le Whif and take it
home? The LaboShop team would, when asked this question, point
to the upcoming product launch, whose date we kept moving out
further into the future as we tried to improve the design of Le
Whif, now a third time, and work out a business model in the
absence of a huge demand.

The team geared
up for the commercial launch over regular late-evening drinks
at the neighborhood café. Production costs needed to be
lowered, simplicity improved, and more chocolate added, among
other things.

With so much happening then
at Le Laboratoire–the global financial crisis having fully
settled down on us–our product development was spotty and
informal. We did the best we could with limited time and
resources. After many delays, the date of the launch was set
for April 29, 2009. There would be a world tour to bring Le
Whif to major cities and accustom people to the notion of
breathing chocolate. We put together communication materials
and planned a launch that resembled the opening of an art
exhibition, which was the only kind of opening we knew. Our
message was philosophical. Breathe chocolate and experience
food as an artistic act. If chocolate failed, we had other
ideas–inhaled spices, inhaled steak, inhaled coffee. Thierry
Marx began to think about it all.

Four
weeks before the scheduled launch in Paris, something very
surprising happened. In his first months working for us, when
he was still living in Cambridge, Tom Hadfield helped us put
the business plan of LaboGroup in shape. In the midst of this
he sent a note in early April saying that he was about to start
a buzz campaign by Internet. Distracted by the challenges of
the launch, we didn’t take special notice. Tom’s note probably
arrived on a Thursday. The campaign was to begin the next day,
he wrote.

On Saturday morning Tom reported
that some blogging had started and the traffic on the Internet
site had doubled. We received another note from Tom on Sunday.
Internet traffic had doubled again. Similar messages came on
Monday and Tuesday. By then Internet orders for Le Whif were
flooding in. Several major blog sites picked up the story
midweek, and on Wednesday the New York Post, the Chicago
Tribune, and the Boston Globe wanted to do interviews. “The
world has been waiting for breathable chocolate!” Tom wrote
ecstatically in one of the many emails now zipping across the
ocean. By the end of the week the Today Show, Good Morning
America, and CBS Morning News had asked for the product to
test. We had waves of orders and media requests from England,
Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, India, Thailand, Japan,
Poland, and other countries.

The world had
awakened to the idea that we had a new, surprising commercial
product. But we actually didn’t. We were unprepared. The day
before the April 29 launch I was in Washington, D.C., to give a
talk at the National Institutes of Health on work I was doing
related to infectious diseases. On my way from the airport I
received an email from Jonathan Kamler explaining that Le Whif
had arrived, filled with chocolate and properly packaged. But,
when he took it out of its packaging to test it, Jonathan
discovered it didn’t function properly. He couldn’t even open
it. Out of a hundred Whifs, perhaps thirty worked. In a
lightning decision, we decided to hand pick the new product,
throw out the defective ones, and launch the next day.
Thankfully, the surprise of the product, the suddenness of
international public reaction, and the bizarre atmosphere of
the FoodLab, with Thierry Marx presiding over lunch, helped
everyone ignore that day how unreliable this first product
actually was.

The team was invited a few
weeks later to the Cannes Film Festival to help animate the
beachfront terrace café of the Majestic Hotel. For two weeks
young women walked between café tables from noon through
mid-afternoon. Shoulder straps held serving trays from which
they offered free Whifs, like vendors selling hotdogs at a
baseball game. Later that month the team traveled to Chicago
for the All Candy Show. This went relatively smoothly, and by
the end of the month we ran out of the first faulty
stock–15,000 Whifs.

A new shipment arrived
in July, and until October 2009 it performed mostly as we
wished it to, particularly in the hands of those educated to
use it or patient enough to learn how to use it even when it
dusted your knees with chocolate, or when the chocolate flew
into your mouth in one quick burst, or when the inhaler arrived
empty, because of some glitch in the filling, packaging, and
transporting process. While we received many disappointed notes
from customers who received Le Whif and either did not
understand it or experienced a malfunction in one of these
ways, we also received notes from at least as many customers
delighted by the product, who understood Le Whif even with all
its youthful blemishes, and who remained hopeful about ordering
more, particularly once we’d figured out the issues of
manufacture and supply.

The experiment
continued. In October we produced an even more reliable
chocolate inhaler that began to sell in Lafayette Gourmet
within the flagship Galeries Lafayette store. Helped by a
brilliant chocolate expert, we completely changed the packaging
and marketing of the product to better signal our commercial
intentions while preparing the launch of a fully commercial
Whif at the end of January 2010. This final product was
launched at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic
Forum, and later that spring in Dylan’s Candy Bar in New York
City and other locations around the United States, such as the
gourmet shop Cardullo’s in Harvard Square. That same spring the
product launched in England within the House of Fraser in
London and in many other cities and towns around the United
Kingdom.

Le Whif’s commercial appearance
mobilized the entire network of artscience labs. LaboGroup ran
the business, Le Laboratoire curated the idea through
exhibitions, The Laboratory at Harvard introduced the product
during its opening in 2009, and the Idea Translation Lab at
Cloud Place organized a few high school whiffing parties.
Through sales, Le Whif would benefit all the artscience labs
eventually; but this was not the reason why Le Whif went on
exhibit in Paris or animated parties in the United States. The
labs participated in this experiment mostly because Le Whif was
a surprising idea, conceived with students at the intersection
of aerosol science and culinary art, and, while fun, it also
expressed something essential about what each lab did, or
wished to do, with students, creators, and the public.

More than a commercial product, Le Whif
carried the creative process outside lab borders. We wished the
product to be understood in its original art-as-process
context. This was signaled by the launch parties in Paris and,
later, at the Cannes Film Festival, in Chicago, in Cambridge,
and elsewhere. It was signaled by the early silver balloon
packaging we used, and by the “airline tickets” we handed out
to explain what we had in mind with the “world tour” promotion.
Our sales approach reflected a lab sensibility; it did not
reflect a reasoned analysis of the market.

Le Whif traversed the entire idea funnel. It started
as a catalyst of education, soon became a catalyst of cultural
exploration, and went on to be a catalyst of commercial sales
revenue that helped keep our labs running. It also inspired new
culinary art and science experiments, from whiffed coffee,
which launched in the spring of 2010, to whiffed vitamins,
scheduled to launch later within the year. And on the horizon
was yet another design, Le Whaf, which I conceived with the
French designer Marc Bretillot as a new way to “drink by
breathing.” This was a new form of food–a standing cloud of
flavor that falls between a liquid and a gas, just as whiffed
food fell somewhere between a solid and a
gas.

From
The Lab: Creativity and Culture by David Edwards.
Copyright © 2010 by David Edwards. Used by permission. All
rights reserved.