On spaghetti sauce Malcolm Gladwell

i think i was supposed to talk about my

new book which um

is called blink and it’s about snap

judgments and first impressions and it

comes out in january and i hope

you all buy it in triplicate um

but i was thinking about this and i

realized that my um that although my new

book makes me happy and

um i think will make my mother happy

it’s not really about happiness

so i decided instead

i would talk about someone who i think

has done as much to make americans happy

um as perhaps anyone over the last uh 20

years a man who is a great personal hero

of mine um someone by the name of howard

moskowitz who is most famous for

reinventing spaghetti sauce um

howard is uh howard’s about this high

and he’s round and he’s um in his 60s

and he has

big huge glasses and

thinning gray hair and he has a kind of

wonderful exuberance and vitality and he

keeps a has a parrot and

he loves the opera and he’s a great

aficionado of of uh medieval history and

he uh by profession he’s a

psychophysicist now i should tell you

that i have no idea what um

psychophysics is although at some point

in my life i dated a girl for two years

who was getting her doctorate in

psychophysics um we should tell you

something about that relationship but

howard

as far as i know psychophysics is about

measuring things um and howard is very

interested in measuring things and he

graduated with his doctor from harvard

and he set up a little consulting shop

in um white plains new york and one of

his first clients was this is many years

ago back in the early 70s one of his

first clients was pepsi

and pepsi came to howard and they said

you know we there’s this new thing

called aspartame and we would like to

make diet pepsi we’d like you to figure

out how much aspartame we should put in

each can of diet pepsi in order to have

the perfect drink

now that sounds like an incredibly

straightforward question to answer

and that’s what howard thought because

pepsi told them look we’re working with

a band between eight and 12 percent

anything below eight percent sweetness

is not sweet enough anything above 12

percent sweetness is too sweet we want

to know what’s the sweet spot between 8

and 12.

now if i gave you this problem to do you

would all say it’s very simple what we

do is we make up a big experimental

batch of pepsi at every degree of

sweetness 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 all the way up

to 12. and we try this out with

thousands of people and we plot the

results on a curve and we take the most

popular concentration right really

simple

howard does the experiment and he gets

the data back and he plots it on a curve

and all of a sudden he realizes it’s not

a nice spell curve in fact data doesn’t

make any sense it’s a mess it’s all over

the place

now most people in that business in the

world of testing food and such are not

dismayed when the data comes back a mess

they think well you know figuring out

what people think about coal is not that

easy

you know maybe we made an error

somewhere along the way

you know let’s just make an educated

guess and they simply point and they go

for 10

right in the middle

howard is not so easily placated howard

is a man of certain degree of

intellectual standards and this was not

good enough for him and he this question

bedeviled him for years and he would

think it through and say what was wrong

why could we not make sense of this

experiment with diet pepsi

and one day he was sitting in a diner in

white plains about to go trying to dream

up some work for nescafe and suddenly

like a bolt of lightning the answer came

to him and that is that when they

analyzed the diet pepsi data they were

asking the wrong question

they were looking for the perfect pepsi

and they should have been looking for

the perfect pepsis

trust me this was an enormous revelation

this was one of the most brilliant

breakthroughs in all of food science and

howard immediately went on the road and

he would go to conferences around the

country and he would stand up and he

would say you have been looking for the

perfect pepsi

you’re wrong you should be looking for

the perfect pepsi’s

people would look at him with a blank

look and they would say what are you

talking about it’s craziness and they

would say you know move next try to get

business nobody would hire him he was

obsessed though and he talked about it

and talked about it and talked about it

howard loves the yiddish expression to a

worm in horseradish the world is

horseradish this was his horseradish

he was obsessed with it

and finally

he had a breakthrough vlasic pickles

came to him

and they said mr moskowitz dr moskowitz

we want to make the perfect pickle and

he said there is no perfect pickle there

are only perfect pickles

and he came back to them and he said you

don’t just need to improve your regular

you need to create zesty

and that’s where we got zesty

pickles then the next person came to him

and that was campbell’s soup this was

even more important in fact campbell’s

soup is where

howard made his reputation

campbell’s made prego and prego in the

early 80s was struggling

next to ragu which was the dominant

spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s now

in the industry i don’t know whether you

care about this or how much time i have

to go into this but

it was technically speaking this is an

aside prego is a better tomato sauce

than a ragu the quality of the tomato

paste is much better this my spice mix

is far superior it adheres to the pasta

in a much more pleasing way in fact they

would do the famous bowl test back in

the 70s with reg with ragu and prego

you’d have a plate of spaghetti and you

would

pour it on right and the ragu would all

go to the bottom and the prego would sit

on top that’s called adherence and

anyway despite the fact that they were

far superior in adherence and the

quality of their tomato paste

prego was struggling so they came to

howard and they said fix us

and howard looked at their product line

and he said what you have is a dead

potatoes

a dead tomato society

so he said this is what i want to do and

he got together with the campbell’s soup

kitchen and he made 45 varieties of

spaghetti sauce and he varied them

according to every conceivable way that

you can vary tomato sauce by sweetness

by level of garlic by tartness by

sourness by tomatoiness by visible

solids my favorite term in this

spaghetti sauce business every

conceivable way you can vary spaghetti

sauce he varied spaghetti sauce and then

he took this whole raft of 45

spaghetti sauces and he went on the road

he went to new york he went to chicago

he went to jacksonville he went to los

angeles and he brought in people by the

truckload into big halls and he sat them

down for two hours and he gave them over

the course of that two hours ten bowls

ten small bowls of pasta with a

different

spaghetti sauce on each one

and after they ate each bowl they were

at to rate from zero to a hundred how

good they thought

the spaghetti sauce was

at the end of that process after doing

it for months and months he had a

mountain of data about how the american

people feel

about spaghetti sauce and then he

analyzed the data now did he look for

the most popular brand

variety of spaghetti sauce no howard

doesn’t believe that there is such a

thing instead he looked at the data and

he said let’s see if we can group these

different all these different data

points into clusters let’s see if they

congregate around certain ideas

and sure enough if you sit down and you

analyze

these all this data on spaghetti sauce

you realize that all americans fall into

one of three groups

there are people who like their

spaghetti sauce plain

there are people who like their

spaghetti sauce spicy

and there are people who like it extra

chunky

and of those three facts the third one

was the most significant

because at the time in the early 1980s

if you went to a supermarket you would

not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce

and prego turned to howard and they said

are you telling me

that one-third of americans crave extra

chunky

spaghetti sauce and yet

no one is servicing their needs and he

said yes

and prego then went back and completely

reformulated their spaghetti sauce and

came out with a line of extra chunky

that immediately and completely took

over the spaghetti sauce business in

this country and over the next 10 years

they made 600 million dollars off their

line of extra chunky sauces

and everyone else in the industry looked

at what howard had done and they said oh

my god

we’ve been thinking all wrong and that’s

when you started to get seven different

kinds of vinegar and 14 different kinds

of of mustard and 71 different kinds of

olive oil and and then eventually even

ragu

howard and howard did the exact same

thing for ragu that he did for prego and

today if you go to the supermarket a

really good one and you look at how many

ragus there are do you know how many

they are 36

in six varieties

cheese

light

robusto

rich and hearty

old world traditional

extra chunky garden

that’s howard’s doing that is howard’s

gift to the american people now why is

that important

it is in fact enormously important i’ll

explain to you why because what howard

did is he fundamentally changed the way

the food industry thinks about making

you happy

assumption number one in the food

industry used to be

that the way to find out what people

want to eat what will make people happy

is to ask them

and for years and years and years and

years ragu and prego would have focus

groups and they would sit all you people

down and they would say what do you want

in a spaghetti sauce tell us what you

wanted spaghetti sauce and for all those

years

20 30 years through all those focus

group sessions no one ever said they

wanted extra chunky

even though at least a third of them

deep in their hearts actually did

people don’t know what they want right

as howard loves to say the mind knows

not what the tongue wants

it’s a mystery

an important critically important step

in understanding our own desires and

taste is to realize that we cannot

always explain what we want deep down

if i asked all of you for example in

this room what you wanted a coffee you

know what you’d say

every one of you would say i want a dark

rich hearty roast

so people always say when you ask them

they want a coffee what do you like dark

rich hearty roast

what percentage of you actually like a

dark rich hearty roast according to

howard some are between 25 and 27 of you

most of you like milky weak coffee

but you will never ever say to someone

who asks you what you want that i want a

milky weak coffee

so that’s

number one thing that howard did

number two thing that howard did is he

he made us realize that’s another very

critical point

he made us realize in the importance of

what

he likes to call horizontal segmentation

why is this critical it’s critical

because this is the way the food

industry thought before howard right

what were they obsessed with in the

early 80s they were obsessed with

mustard in particular they were obsessed

with the story of great boupon right

used to be there were two mustards

frenches and goldens what were they

yellow mustard what’s in yellow mustard

yellow mustard seeds turmeric and

paprika that was mustard grey poupon

came along with a dijon right

much more volatile brown mustard seed

some white wine a nose hit much more

delicate aromatics and what do they do

they put it in a little tiny glass jar

with wonderful enameled label on it made

it look french even though it’s made in

oxnard california

and instead of charging a dollar fifty

for the eight ounce

can the way the great outs bottle the

way that frenches and goldens did they

decided to charge four dollars and then

they had those ads right with the guy in

the rolls royce and he’s eating the

grape groupon the other rolls-royce

pulls up and he says do you have any

grey poupon and the whole thing after

they did that grapefruit pot takes off

he takes over the mustard business and

everyone’s take-home lesson from that

was

that the way to get to make people happy

is to give them something that is more

expensive something to aspire to right

is to make them turn their back on what

they

like think they like now and reach out

for something higher up the mustard

hierarchy

a better mustard a more expensive

mustard a mustard more sophistication

and culture and

and howard looked at that and said

that’s wrong

mustard does not exist on a hierarchy

mustard exists just like tomato sauce on

a horizontal plane there is no good

mustard or bad mustard there is no

perfect mustard or imperfect mustard

there are only different kinds of

mustards that suit different kinds of

people

he fundamentally

democratized the way we think about

taste and for that as well we owe howard

moskowitz a huge vote of thanks

third thing that howard did and perhaps

the most important

is howard confronted the notion of the

platonic dish

what do i mean by that

for the longest time in the food

industry there was a sense that there

was one way a perfect way to make a dish

you go to chapanese

they give you the red tail sashimi with

roasted pumpkin seeds in a something

something reduction they don’t give you

five options on the reduction right they

don’t say do you want the extra chunky

reduction or do you want the

no you just get the reduction why

because the chef at chapanese has a

platonic notion about red tail sashimi

this is the way it ought to be

and when that you know and she serves it

that way time and time again and if you

quarrel with her she will say you know

what you’re wrong

this is the best way it ought to be in

this restaurant now that same idea

fueled the commercial food industry as

well

they had a notion a platonic notion of

what tomato sauce was and where did that

come from it came from italy

italian tomato sauce is what it’s

blended it’s thin

the culture of tomato sauce was thin

when we talked about authentic tomato

sauce in the 1970s we talked about

italian tomato sauce we talked about the

earliest ragus which had no visible

solids right

which were thin you just put a little

bit over that and it sunk down to the

bottom of the pasta that’s what it was

and why were we attached to that because

we thought that what it took to make

people happy was to provide them with

the most culturally authentic tomato

sauce a b and b we thought that if we

gave them the culturally authentic

tomato sauce then they would embrace it

and that’s what would please the maximum

number of people

and howard and the reason we thought

that in other words people in the

cooking world were looking for cooking

universals

they were looking for one way to treat

all of us and it’s good reason for them

to be obsessed with the idea of

universals because all of science

through the 19th century and much of the

20th was obsessed with universals

psychologists medical scientists

economics economists we’re all

interested in finding out the rules that

govern the way all of us behave

but that changed right yes what is the

great revolution in science of the last

10 15 years it is the movement from the

search for universals

to the understanding of variability

now in medical science we don’t want to

know how necessarily just how cancer

works we want to know how your cancer is

different from my cancer i guess my

cancer is different from your cancer

we’re interested in genetics has opened

the door to the study of human

variability what howard moskowitz was

doing was saying this same revolution

needs to happen in the world of tomato

sauce

and for that we owe him a great vote of

thanks

i’ll give you one last illustration of

variability

and that is and i’m sorry howard not

only believed that but he took it a

second step which was to say that

when we pursue universal principles in

food

we aren’t just making an error we are

actually doing ourselves a massive

disservice

and the example he used was coffee

and coffee is

something he did a lot of work with with

nescafe

if i would ask all of you to try and

come up with a brand of coffee a type of

coffee a brew

that made all of you happy and then i

asked you to rate that coffee the

average score in this room for coffee

would be about 60 on a scale of zero to

if however you allowed me to break you

into cluster coffee clusters maybe three

or four copy clusters and i could make

coffee just for one of those for each of

those individual clusters your scores

would go from 60 to 75 or 78.

the difference between

coffee

at 60 and coffee at 78 is the difference

between coffee that makes you wince and

coffee that makes you deliriously happy

that is the final i think most beautiful

lesson of howard moskowitz that in

embracing the diversity

of human beings we will find a sure way

to true happiness

you