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