Campbell Soup Boosts Prego Sales by Rejecting Single Perfect Sauce

Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell — TED

TED

The food industry dramatically increases consumer delight by abandoning the search for a single universal product in favor of horizontal segmentation that embraces human variability.

AI-assisted summary of Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell — original source. Check the original for full context.

Source published: 2007-01-16

Key ideas

Psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry by shifting the search from a single universal product to plural formulations tailored to distinct consumer segments. (1:33)
Extensive tasting data for Prego revealed that one-third of Americans secretly craved extra-chunky spaghetti sauce, a discovery that earned Campbell Soup $600 million over a decade despite consumers never having articulated the request. (4:57)
Consumers routinely fail to articulate what they actually like; for instance, while most people claim to want dark, hearty coffee, roughly 75% actually prefer weak, milky coffee. (10:46)
Segmenting consumers into tailored taste groups raises average satisfaction scores from a mediocre 60 to 75–78 on a 100-point scale, transforming consumer indifference into genuine delight. (16:20)

Detailed notes

## Background Published on YouTube by TED on January 16, 2007, this talk features author Malcolm Gladwell. According to the video description, Gladwell explores the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce to make a broader argument about the nature of choice and human happiness.

## TL;DR Malcolm Gladwell chronicles how psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry by abandoning the quest for a single universal product in favor of horizontal segmentation. Through groundbreaking work with brands like Prego, Moskowitz proved that consumers cannot always articulate their preferences—uncovering a massive, untapped demand for extra-chunky tomato sauce that transformed market philosophy. Gladwell argues that dismantling the myth of a single 'Platonic dish' and embracing sensory variability dramatically increases human satisfaction, offering a vital framework for understanding genuine happiness.

## Atmosphere & style Gladwell delivers an engaging, witty, and conversational presentation characterized by affectionate character sketches and sharp observational humor. The narrative effortlessly moves between quirky food-science case studies—such as Diet Pepsi sweet spots and pasta bowl tests—and deep industrial analysis. As the talk progresses, it evolves from playful corporate storytelling into an inspiring, philosophically resonant defense of human diversity.

## Bulletin - [01:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=93s) Psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry by shifting the search from a single universal product to plural formulations tailored to distinct consumer segments. - [04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=297s) Extensive tasting data for Prego revealed that one-third of Americans secretly craved extra-chunky spaghetti sauce, a discovery that earned Campbell Soup $600 million over a decade despite consumers never having articulated the request. - [10:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=646s) Consumers routinely fail to articulate what they actually like; for instance, while most people claim to want dark, hearty coffee, roughly 75% actually prefer weak, milky coffee. - [16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=980s) Segmenting consumers into tailored taste groups raises average satisfaction scores from a mediocre 60 to 75–78 on a 100-point scale, transforming consumer indifference into genuine delight.

## Key takeaways - [00:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=25s) Malcolm Gladwell spotlights psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz as an unsung hero who transformed American happiness by rethinking food formulation. - [01:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=93s) While testing Diet Pepsi sweetness between 8% and 12% aspartame, Moskowitz encountered scattered, chaotic data rather than a clean bell curve. - [01:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=93s) Moskowitz realized the industry's fundamental flaw: they were searching for the perfect Pepsi instead of the perfect Pepsis. - [04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=297s) Despite having better tomato paste and superior adherence to pasta compared to market leader Ragù, Prego was failing in the early 1980s. - [04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=297s) Moskowitz formulated 45 distinct spaghetti sauces and tested them across US cities, using cluster analysis to uncover three natural preference segments: plain, spicy, and extra chunky. - [04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=297s) Prego's introduction of extra-chunky sauce proved a massive commercial breakthrough, earning $600 million over the following decade. - [08:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=533s) Consumers are incapable of articulating their subconscious sensory desires: decades of focus groups never once requested an extra-chunky sauce. - [08:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=533s) The success of Prego sparked widespread horizontal diversification across supermarket staples, expanding selections of mustard, vinegar, and olive oil. - [10:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=646s) Aspirational bias skews consumer reporting: people claim to want dark, rich coffee, but 73% to 75% actually enjoy weak, milky coffee. - [10:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=646s) Grey Poupon led the food industry to believe consumers wanted an aspirational, vertical status hierarchy from cheap yellow mustard to expensive Dijon. - [10:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=646s) Moskowitz rejected vertical culinary hierarchies, showing that taste exists on a horizontal plane where no variety is inherently superior to another. - [13:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=811s) The culinary obsession with the 'Platonic dish'—a single, authentic, ideal preparation—is a fallacy that restricts consumer satisfaction. - [13:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=811s) Moskowitz's work mirrors the broader scientific revolution of shifting focus from universal rules to understanding human variability. - [16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=980s) Universal food formulations typically score around 60 out of 100 in consumer satisfaction, whereas segmented products jump to 75–78, marking the difference between grimacing and genuine delight. - [16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=980s) Embracing human variability rather than forcing uniformity is a fundamental key to understanding human choice and achieving true happiness.

## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=25s) Shifting from *Blink* to Howard Moskowitz

Malcolm Gladwell opens by noting that he was originally expected to speak about his upcoming book, *Blink*, which examines snap judgments and first impressions. Though he quips that the book comes out in January and hopes the audience buys it "in triplicate," he realized that while it makes him and his mother happy, it is not fundamentally about happiness itself. Instead, he pivots to an unsung figure whom he considers a great personal hero and someone who has done as much to make Americans happy over the past two decades as anyone alive: Howard Moskowitz, a man famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Gladwell describes Moskowitz with affectionate, vivid detail: he is a round man in his 60s, of modest height, sporting enormous glasses and thinning gray hair, blessed with an infectious exuberance and vitality. He keeps a pet parrot, loves opera, is passionate about medieval history, and works as a psychophysicist. Gladwell jokes about having dated someone pursuing a doctorate in psychophysics for two years without ever truly understanding the field—joking about what that reveals about the relationship—before summarizing psychophysics simply as the science of measuring things, something Moskowitz is profoundly dedicated to doing.

[01:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=93s) The Diet Pepsi Conundrum and the Plural Epiphany

After earning his doctorate from Harvard, Moskowitz established a consulting practice in White Plains, New York. In the early 1970s, one of his earliest clients was Pepsi. Artificial sweetener aspartame had just emerged, and Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to determine the exact amount of aspartame needed per can to formulate the ideal Diet Pepsi. Pepsi established boundaries: anything below 8 percent sweetness was insufficiently sweet, while anything above 12 percent was overwhelmingly sweet. They hired Moskowitz to find the optimal sweet spot between 8 and 12 percent.

The assignment seemed deceptively simple: formulate experimental batches spanning the range in incremental fractions of a percent, serve them to thousands of consumers, plot the ratings on a graph, and identify the peak of the bell curve. Yet when Moskowitz plotted the data, no neat bell curve appeared. The results were completely chaotic and scattered across the board. In food testing, researchers typically shrug off such messy data, assuming human taste is fickle, chalking it up to experimental error, and arbitrarily settling on the middle figure of 10 percent. Moskowitz, however, refused to compromise his intellectual standards, and the riddle plagued him for years.

The breakthrough struck unexpectedly while Moskowitz sat in a White Plains diner preparing a pitch for Nescafé. He realized that the entire industry had framed the problem incorrectly. As Gladwell recounts:

> “They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis.”

Moskowitz took this revolutionary insight on the road, lecturing industry audiences across the nation that seeking a single universal product was a fundamental mistake. His message was met with blank stares, confusion, and rejection from executives who dismissed him as crazy. Moskowitz refused to let the idea drop, personifying the Yiddish proverb he frequently quoted: “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Moskowitz's Paradigm Shift in Food Science accDescr: Diagram contrasting the traditional search for a single universal food product with Moskowitz's segmentation discovery.

subgraph Traditional["Traditional Approach (Singular)"] A["Single Formulation\n(e.g., Target Sweet Spot)"] --> B["Test on Broad Audience"] B --> C["Messy, Inconclusive Data"] C --> D["Arbitrary Compromise\n(Pick the Middle / 10%)"] end

subgraph Moskowitz["Moskowitz Breakthrough (Plural)"] E["Multiple Diverse Formulations\n(Vary All Sensory Dimensions)"] --> F["Large-Scale Consumer Testing"] F --> G["Cluster Analysis"] G --> H["Segmented Products\n(Plain, Spicy, Extra-Chunky)"] end ```

[04:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=297s) The Prego Experiment and the Discovery of Extra-Chunky

Moskowitz's first client breakthrough arrived when Vlasic Pickles sought his help to create "the perfect pickle." Moskowitz countered that there was no singular perfect pickle, only perfect pickles, and guided them to launch a "zesty" variety alongside their traditional recipe. Soon after, Campbell Soup Company brought him in to revive Prego. In the early 1980s, Prego was languishing behind Ragù, the undisputed market leader. Prego actually possessed superior ingredients and performance—it had higher-quality tomato paste, better spices, and far superior "adherence" (the industry term demonstrated in bowl tests where Ragù sank to the bottom of the pasta while Prego clung to the top). Despite these technical advantages, Prego remained in trouble.

Moskowitz evaluated the brand and declared: “What you have is a dead tomato society.” Working directly in Campbell's test kitchens, he developed 45 distinct formulations of spaghetti sauce, manipulating every conceivable sensory variable: sweetness, garlic intensity, acidity, tartness, tomato character, and "visible solids." He then embarked on a nationwide tour, setting up massive tasting operations in New York, Chicago, Jacksonville, and Los Angeles.

- **Sample testing protocol:** Truckloads of everyday consumers attended two-hour sessions where each person evaluated ten distinct bowls of pasta with different sauce formulations. - **Scoring system:** Participants rated each sauce on an intensity/pleasure scale from 0 to 100, generating an unprecedented mountain of empirical sensory data. - **Cluster analysis:** Rather than averaging the numbers to seek a nonexistent consensus champion, Moskowitz ran cluster analyses to uncover natural taste groupings.

The data revealed that American tastes reliably divided into three distinct segments: 1. People who prefer their sauce plain 2. People who prefer their sauce spicy 3. People who prefer their sauce extra chunky

The extra-chunky finding was groundbreaking because no major manufacturer sold an extra-chunky sauce in grocery stores at the time. When Campbell asked in astonishment whether a full third of Americans genuinely wanted extra-chunky sauce without anyone serving them, Moskowitz confirmed it. Prego overhauled its product line and launched an extra-chunky sauce that captured market share, generating $600 million in sales over the following decade.

[08:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=533s) "The Mind Knows Not What the Tongue Wants"

The success of Prego sent shockwaves through the consumer packaged goods industry. Competitors realized their foundational philosophy was flawed, triggering an explosion of product diversification: from seven varieties of vinegar to 14 styles of mustard and 71 kinds of olive oil. Eventually, Ragù hired Moskowitz to perform the identical overhaul, leading to modern grocery shelves stocked with 36 varieties across six lines, including Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, and Extra-Chunky Garden.

Gladwell emphasizes that Moskowitz's real contribution was overthrowing the food industry's foundational dogma: the belief that the proper way to learn what people want is simply to ask them. For twenty to thirty years, Prego and Ragù had run endless focus groups asking participants what they wanted in a tomato sauce, and not once had anyone requested an extra-chunky version—even though a third of the population hungered for it. Consumers were not lying; they simply lacked the vocabulary and self-awareness to articulate their sensory preferences. As Gladwell emphasizes:

> “As Howard loves to say, ‘The mind knows not what the tongue wants.’”

Gladwell concludes this realization is fundamental: understanding human happiness, choice, and desire requires accepting that people cannot always explain what they want deep down.

[10:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=646s) The Coffee Paradox and Horizontal Segmentation

When consumers are asked directly about their preferences, their stated desires rarely match their actual tastes. Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this with coffee: if you ask an audience what kind of brew they want, everyone invariably declares, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” Yet according to psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz, only about 25 to 27 percent of people genuinely enjoy coffee made that way. The overwhelming majority actually prefer milky, weak coffee, but social conditioning and aspirational posturing prevent them from ever admitting it openly. Uncovering what people cannot articulate was the first breakthrough Moskowitz introduced.

His second crucial insight was the concept of "horizontal segmentation," which overturned the food industry’s conventional wisdom of the early 1980s. At that time, food executives were captivated by the meteoric rise of Grey Poupon. The market had previously been dominated by standard yellow mustards from French's and Gulden's, made simply from yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. Grey Poupon introduced a Dijon style featuring more volatile brown mustard seeds, white wine, delicate aromatics, and an unmistakable sharp bite. Packaged in a small glass jar with an elegant enameled label to evoke French sophistication—despite being manufactured in Oxnard, California—it retailed for four dollars instead of the standard dollar-fifty for an eight-ounce bottle. Propelled by iconic television commercials featuring two men in Rolls-Royces asking for Grey Poupon, the product took over the mustard business. Marketers drew the conclusion that consumers wanted an aspirational, expensive hierarchy where they abandoned everyday items for a refined alternative. Moskowitz rejected this hierarchical model entirely:

> “Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane.”

Moskowitz showed that taste does not exist on a ladder of good versus bad or perfect versus imperfect. Instead, diverse varieties simply suit diverse groups of people, a realization that fundamentally democratized the food industry.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Hierarchical versus Horizontal Segmentation accDescr: Diagram contrasting the traditional vertical status hierarchy against Moskowitz's horizontal taste segmentation model.

subgraph Vertical["Traditional Hierarchical Model (Status & Aspiration)"] V3["Dijon / Grey Poupon ($4.00, Luxury)"] V2["Aspirational Mustard"] V1["Yellow Mustard: French's / Gulden's ($1.50)"] V1 --> V2 --> V3 end

subgraph Horizontal["Moskowitz's Horizontal Model (Democratic Taste)"] H1["Yellow Mustard<br>(Mild, Turmeric, Paprika)"] H2["Dijon Mustard<br>(Brown Seed, White Wine)"] H3["Spicy / Chunky / Sweet Mustards"] end ```

- **Stated vs. actual coffee preferences:** Almost everyone claims to crave a "dark, rich, hearty roast," but 73% to 75% actually prefer weak, milky coffee. - **The traditional mustard ingredients:** Yellow mustard seed, turmeric, and paprika. - **The Grey Poupon formula:** Brown mustard seed, white wine, and volatile aromatics produced in Oxnard, California, sold at $4.00 versus $1.50 for standard brands.

---

[13:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=811s) The Fallacy of the Platonic Dish and Universal Truths

Moskowitz’s third, and arguably most profound, achievement was dismantling the culinary myth of the "Platonic dish." Throughout the food world, chefs and food scientists operated under the belief that there existed a single ideal way to prepare any food item. Gladwell points to high-end dining institutions like Chez Panisse, where a chef might serve red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a specific reduction without ever offering patrons alternative preparations or extra-chunky variations. In that culinary mindset, the dish embodies an absolute, immutable standard, and anyone who disagrees is simply considered mistaken.

That same fixation on a singular ideal had long paralyzed the commercial tomato sauce market. Manufacturers clung to the belief that the definitive sauce had to mirror traditional Italian sauce: a thin, blended, smooth liquid with no visible solids, similar to early Ragù products that filtered down to the bottom of a pasta bowl. The industry assumed that maximizing consumer satisfaction meant delivering the most culturally authentic recipe possible. This obsession mirrored nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, where psychology, economics, and medicine uniformly sought universal laws governing human behavior. Just as modern medical science evolved from asking how cancer works in the abstract to examining the genetic variability between individual patients, Moskowitz insisted that food science abandon universals in favor of human variation:

> “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.”

- **The Chez Panisse analogy:** A chef serves red-tail sashimi in an exact reduction because of an unyielding conviction that there is only one correct way to prepare the dish. - **The historical benchmark for sauce:** Thin, blended Italian tomato sauces like early Ragù formulations were treated as the singular authentic standard. - **The scientific parallel:** Modern medicine abandoned one-size-fits-all treatments to understand individual genetic variations in illnesses like cancer.

---

[16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=980s) Quantifying Delight: From Universals to Genuine Happiness

Pursuing a single universal recipe does not merely produce minor errors; it actively depresses human satisfaction. Drawing on his extensive consulting work with Nescafé, Moskowitz proved this cost through measurable ratings. If researchers develop a single, generalized blend of coffee formulated to appease an entire room of people, the average satisfaction rating lands around 60 on a 100-point scale. However, if that same population is broken into three or four distinct taste clusters and served tailored brews designed specifically for each group, individual ratings leap to 75 or 78.

Gladwell emphasizes that this numerical shift represents a qualitative transformation in daily human experience:

> “The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.”

Rather than coercing people toward a standardized ideal or an aspirational universal, recognizing human variability provides the true foundation for consumer satisfaction. Gladwell concludes his talk by emphasizing that Moskowitz's work extends far beyond spaghetti sauce and instant coffee:

> “That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness.”

- **Universal brew score:** A single coffee blend targeted at everyone scores an average of roughly 60 out of 100. - **Clustered brew score:** Segmenting consumers into three or four distinct clusters elevates ratings to 75–78 out of 100. - **The emotional impact:** Moving from a score of 60 to 78 marks the threshold between food that causes a wince and food that delivers genuine delight.

## Notable quotes > [08:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=533s) The mind knows not what the tongue wants. — Howard Moskowitz

> [13:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=811s) 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. — Malcolm Gladwell

> [16:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&t=980s) That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. — Malcolm Gladwell

## Mentioned Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Moskowitz, Blink, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi, Nescafé, Vlasic Pickles, Campbell Soup Company, Prego, Ragù, Grey Poupon, French's, Gulden's, Chez Panisse

## Video description http://www.ted.com Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y)

中文简报

金宝汤摒弃单一完美配方，Prego销量大增食品行业通过放弃寻找单一通用产品，转而采用接纳人类差异性的横向细分，显著提升了消费者的满意度。马尔科姆·格拉德威尔记录了心理物理学家霍华德·莫斯科维茨如何通过放弃寻找单一通用产品、转向横向细分，从而彻底改变了食品行业。通过与Prego等品牌的开创性合作，莫斯科维茨证明了消费者并不总是能够清楚表达自己的偏好——他发掘出市场对特浓大颗粒番茄酱的巨大潜在需求，这重塑了市场哲学。格拉德威尔认为，破除对单一“柏拉图式菜肴”的迷思并拥抱感官多样性，能极大地提升人们的满足感，为理解真正的幸福提供了至关重要的框架。心理物理学家霍华德·莫斯科维茨通过将研发重点从单一通用产品转向针对不同消费群体的多元配方，彻底改变了食品行业。 (1:33) 针对Prego的大量品尝数据显示，三分之一的美国人私下里渴望特浓大颗粒意面酱；尽管消费者从未明确提出过这一需求，这项发现仍帮助金宝汤在十年间斩获了6亿美元收入。 (4:57) 消费者通常无法准确表达自己真正喜欢什么；例如，尽管多数人声称喜欢浓烈纯正的黑咖啡，但实际上约有75%的人偏爱清淡加奶的咖啡。 (10:46) 将消费者细分为量身定制的口味群组，可将百分制下的平均满意度从平庸的60分提升至75到78分，从而将消费者的无动于衷转化为真正的喜悦。 (16:20)

Source quotes

[8:53] Howard Moskowitz: The mind knows not what the tongue wants. [13:31] Malcolm Gladwell: 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. [16:20] Malcolm Gladwell: That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness.

Original transcript

[0:25] I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, [0:28] which is called "Blink," [0:29] and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. [0:33] And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. [0:36] (Laughter) [0:38] But I was thinking about this, [0:40] and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, [0:44] and I think would make my mother happy, [0:46] it's not really about happiness. [0:49] So I decided instead, I would talk about someone [0:53] who I think has done as much to make Americans happy [0:56] as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, [1:00] a man who is a great personal hero of mine: [1:03] someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, [1:06] who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. [1:10] Howard's about this high, and he's round, [1:15] and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses [1:20] and thinning gray hair, [1:21] and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, [1:25] and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, [1:28] and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. [1:33] And by profession, he's a psychophysicist. [1:35] Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, [1:40] although at some point in my life, [1:42] I dated a girl for two years [1:43] who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. [1:45] Which should tell you something about that relationship. [1:49] (Laughter) [1:51] As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. [1:55] And Howard is very interested in measuring things. [1:57] And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, [2:00] and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. [2:04] And one of his first clients was Pepsi. [2:06] This is many years ago, back in the early 70s. [2:10] And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, [2:12] "You know, there's this new thing called aspartame, [2:14] and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. [2:16] We'd like you to figure out [2:18] how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi [2:22] in order to have the perfect drink." [2:24] Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, [2:29] and that's what Howard thought. [2:30] Because Pepsi told him, [2:31] "We're working with a band between eight and 12 percent. [2:34] Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough; [2:37] anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet. [2:40] We want to know: what's the sweet spot between 8 and 12?" [2:44] Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple. [2:48] What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, [2:52] at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, [2:56] all the way up to 12 -- [2:57] and we try this out with thousands of people, [3:00] and we plot the results on a curve, [3:02] and we take the most popular concentration, right? [3:05] Really simple. [3:06] Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, [3:09] and he plots it on a curve, [3:10] and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve. [3:13] In fact, the data doesn't make any sense. [3:15] It's a mess. It's all over the place. [3:18] Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, [3:22] are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. [3:25] They think, "Well, you know, [3:26] figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy." [3:29] "You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way." [3:32] "You know, let's just make an educated guess," [3:34] and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, [3:37] right in the middle. [3:39] Howard is not so easily placated. [3:41] Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. [3:43] And this was not good enough for him, [3:46] and this question bedeviled him for years. [3:48] And he would think it through and say, "What was wrong? [3:51] Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?" [3:55] And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, [3:58] about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. [4:01] And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. [4:05] And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, [4:07] they were asking the wrong question. [4:09] They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, [4:11] and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. [4:15] Trust me. [4:16] This was an enormous revelation. [4:19] This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. [4:22] Howard immediately went on the road, [4:24] and he would go to conferences around the country, [4:26] and he would stand up and say, [4:28] "You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. [4:30] You're wrong. [4:31] You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis." [4:34] And people would look at him blankly and say, [4:37] "What are you talking about? Craziness." [4:39] And they would say, "Move! Next!" [4:41] Tried to get business, nobody would hire him -- [4:43] he was obsessed, though, [4:44] and he talked about it and talked about it. [4:46] Howard loves the Yiddish expression [4:48] "To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish." [4:51] This was his horseradish. [4:53] (Laughter) [4:54] He was obsessed with it! [4:57] And finally, he had a breakthrough. [4:59] Vlasic Pickles came to him, [5:02] and they said, "Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle." [5:06] And he said, [5:07] "There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles." [5:11] And he came back to them and he said, [5:13] "You don't just need to improve your regular; [5:15] you need to create zesty." [5:16] And that's where we got zesty pickles. [5:19] Then the next person came to him: Campbell's Soup. [5:22] And this was even more important. [5:24] In fact, Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation. [5:27] Campbell's made Prego, [5:28] and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragù, [5:32] which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s. [5:36] In the industry -- I don't know whether you care about this, [5:39] or how much time I have to go into this. [5:41] But it was, technically speaking -- this is an aside -- [5:44] Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragù. [5:46] The quality of the tomato paste is much better; [5:48] the spice mix is far superior; [5:50] it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. [5:52] In fact, they would do the famous bowl test [5:54] back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego. [5:57] You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? [6:01] And the Ragù would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. [6:06] That's called "adherence." [6:07] And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, [6:12] and the quality of their tomato paste, [6:15] Prego was struggling. [6:16] So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. [6:19] And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, [6:22] what you have is a dead tomato society. [6:26] So he said, this is what I want to do. [6:28] And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, [6:30] and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. [6:34] And he varied them according to every conceivable way [6:37] that you can vary tomato sauce: [6:39] by sweetness, by level of garlic, [6:40] by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, [6:44] by visible solids -- [6:45] my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. [6:48] (Laughter) [6:49] Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, [6:53] he varied spaghetti sauce. [6:55] And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, [6:58] and he went on the road. [7:00] He went to New York, to Chicago, [7:02] he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles. [7:03] And he brought in people by the truckload into big halls. [7:07] And he sat them down for two hours, [7:09] and over the course of that two hours, he gave them ten bowls. [7:12] Ten small bowls of pasta, [7:14] with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. [7:17] And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, [7:21] how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was. [7:24] At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, [7:27] he had a mountain of data [7:29] about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. [7:33] And then he analyzed the data. [7:34] Did he look for the most popular variety of spaghetti sauce? [7:38] No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. [7:41] Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, [7:43] let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. [7:49] Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. [7:52] And sure enough, if you sit down, [7:54] and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, [7:57] you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. [8:01] There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; [8:04] there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; [8:07] and there are people who like it extra chunky. [8:09] And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, [8:14] because at the time, in the early 1980s, [8:16] if you went to a supermarket, [8:18] you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. [8:21] And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, [8:24] "You're telling me that one third of Americans [8:26] crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce [8:30] and yet no one is servicing their needs?" [8:32] And he said "Yes!" [8:33] (Laughter) [8:34] And Prego then went back, [8:36] and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, [8:38] and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely [8:42] took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. [8:45] And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars [8:49] off their line of extra-chunky sauces. [8:53] Everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, [8:56] "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" [8:58] And that's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, [9:02] and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil. [9:07] And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, [9:11] and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. [9:14] And today, if you go to a really good supermarket, [9:16] do you know how many Ragùs there are? [9:18] 36! [9:20] In six varieties: [9:22] Cheese, Light, [9:25] Robusto, Rich & Hearty, [9:28] Old World Traditional -- [9:32] Extra-Chunky Garden. [9:34] (Laughter) [9:36] That's Howard's doing. [9:37] That is Howard's gift to the American people. [9:40] Now why is that important? [9:41] (Laughter) [9:44] It is, in fact, enormously important. [9:46] I'll explain to you why. [9:47] What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks [9:51] about making you happy. [9:54] Assumption number one in the food industry used to be [9:57] that the way to find out what people want to eat, [9:59] what will make people happy, is to ask them. [10:02] And for years and years and years, [10:04] Ragù and Prego would have focus groups, [10:06] and they would sit you down, and they would say, [10:09] "What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? [10:10] Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." [10:13] And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- [10:16] through all those focus group sessions, [10:18] no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. [10:21] Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. [10:25] (Laughter) [10:27] People don't know what they want! [10:29] As Howard loves to say, [10:31] "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." [10:33] It's a mystery! [10:35] (Laughter) [10:36] And a critically important step [10:38] in understanding our own desires and tastes [10:41] is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want, deep down. [10:46] If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, [10:50] you know what you'd say? [10:51] Every one of you would say, "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." [10:56] It's what people always say when you ask them. [10:58] "What do you like?" "Dark, rich, hearty roast!" [11:01] What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? [11:04] According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. [11:08] Most of you like milky, weak coffee. [11:10] (Laughter) [11:11] But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want [11:15] that "I want a milky, weak coffee." [11:17] So that's number one thing that Howard did. [11:21] Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- [11:25] it's another very critical point -- [11:27] he made us realize the importance [11:29] of what he likes to call "horizontal segmentation." [11:33] Why is this critical? [11:34] Because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. [11:37] What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? [11:40] They were obsessed with mustard. [11:41] In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. [11:45] Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. [11:48] What were they? Yellow mustard. [11:49] What's in it? [11:50] Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. [11:52] That was mustard. [11:53] Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. [11:56] Right? [11:57] Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, [12:03] much more delicate aromatics. [12:05] And what do they do? [12:06] They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, [12:11] made it look French, [12:12] even though it's made in Oxnard, California. [12:14] (Laughter) [12:15] And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, [12:20] the way that French's and Gulden's did, [12:22] they decided to charge four dollars. [12:23] And they had those ads. [12:24] With the guy in the Rolls Royce, eating the Grey Poupon. [12:27] Another pulls up, and says, "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" [12:30] And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! [12:33] Takes over the mustard business! [12:35] And everyone's take-home lesson from that [12:37] was that the way to make people happy [12:42] is to give them something that is more expensive, [12:45] something to aspire to. [12:47] It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, [12:51] and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. [12:55] (Laughter) [12:56] A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! [12:58] A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. [13:01] And Howard looked to that and said, "That's wrong!" [13:04] Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. [13:07] Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. [13:11] There is no good mustard or bad mustard. [13:14] There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. [13:17] There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. [13:21] He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. [13:26] And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks. [13:31] Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, [13:34] is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. [13:37] (Laughter) [13:38] What do I mean by that? [13:39] (Laughter) [13:41] For the longest time in the food industry, [13:43] there was a sense that there was one way, [13:46] a perfect way, to make a dish. [13:49] You go to Chez Panisse, [13:51] they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds [13:56] in a something something reduction. [13:58] They don't give you five options on the reduction. [14:01] They don't say, "Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or ...?" [14:04] No! [14:05] You just get the reduction. Why? [14:07] Because the chef at Chez Panisse [14:08] has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. [14:11] "This is the way it ought to be." [14:13] And she serves it that way time and time again, [14:18] and if you quarrel with her, she will say, [14:20] "You know what? You're wrong! [14:22] This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant." [14:25] Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. [14:29] They had a Platonic notion of what tomato sauce was. [14:32] And where did that come from? It came from Italy. [14:35] Italian tomato sauce is what? [14:37] It's blended; it's thin. [14:39] The culture of tomato sauce was thin. [14:41] When we talked about "authentic tomato sauce" in the 1970s, [14:44] we talked about Italian tomato sauce, [14:46] we talked about the earliest Ragùs, [14:48] which had no visible solids, right? [14:51] Which were thin, you just put a little bit [14:53] and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. [14:55] That's what it was. [14:56] And why were we attached to that? [14:58] Because we thought that what it took to make people happy [15:00] was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A. [15:05] And B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, [15:10] then they would embrace it. [15:12] And that's what would please the maximum number of people. [15:15] In other words, [15:17] people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. [15:21] They were looking for one way to treat all of us. [15:23] And it's good reason for them to be obsessed [15:26] with the idea of universals, [15:27] because all of science, [15:29] through the 19th century and much of the 20th, [15:31] was obsessed with universals. [15:33] Psychologists, medical scientists, economists [15:37] were all interested in finding out the rules [15:39] that govern the way all of us behave. [15:42] But that changed, right? [15:43] What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? [15:47] It is the movement from the search for universals [15:50] to the understanding of variability. [15:53] Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, [15:57] just how cancer works, [15:58] we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. [16:02] I guess my cancer different from your cancer. [16:04] Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. [16:08] What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, [16:11] "This same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce." [16:16] And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. [16:20] I'll give you one last illustration of variability, [16:23] and that is -- oh, I'm sorry. [16:24] Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, [16:28] which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, [16:33] we aren't just making an error; [16:35] we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. [16:39] And the example he used was coffee. [16:41] And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafé. [16:45] If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- [16:49] a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy, [16:52] and then I asked you to rate that coffee, [16:54] the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. [16:58] If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, [17:02] maybe three or four coffee clusters, [17:04] and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, [17:09] your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. [17:13] The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 [17:18] is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, [17:21] and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. [17:24] That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, [17:27] of Howard Moskowitz: [17:29] that in embracing the diversity of human beings, [17:33] we will find a surer way to true happiness. [17:35] Thank you. [17:36] (Applause)