On spaghetti sauce - Malcolm Gladwell

I think I was supposed to talk about my new book which 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 but I was thinking about this and I realized it my that although my new book makes me happy and 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 as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years a man who is a great personal hero of mine someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce Howard is heard about this high and he's round and he's 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 her as a parrot and he loves the Opera and he's of great aficionado of medieval history and here by profession he's as like a physicist now I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is although at some point of my life I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics we should tell you something about that relationship but Howard as far as I know second physics is about measuring things 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 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 8 and 12 percent anything below 8% sweetness is not sweet enough anything above 12% 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 you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi at every degree of sweetness eight percent eight point one eight point two eight point three all the way up to twelve 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 bat 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 of somewhere along the way you know let's just make an educated guess and they simply point and they go for ten percent 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 do and say what was wrong why could we not make sense of this experiment with dyed 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 dye Pepsi data they were asking the wrong question they were looking for the perfect Pepsi and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsi's trust me this was an enormous revelation this was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science and how it immediately went on the road and he would go to conferences around the country Andy would stand up and even say you had 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 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 who talked about it Howard loves the Yiddish expression to a Worman 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. Moscowitz 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 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 ragu the quality of the tomato paste is much better the 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 rag 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 he said what you have is a dead potatoes Society of dead tomatoes 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 tomato enos by visible solids my favorite term and getting 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 hauls 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 had to rate from zero to 100 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 nearly 1980s if he went to a supermarket you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and prego turned to Howard and I 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 and done it 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 mustard and 71 different kinds of olive oil and then eventually even ragu hired 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 you look at how many ragu there are dude oh how many they are thirty-six in six varieties cheese light robusta 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 enormous ly 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 Raghu 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 to get e sauce for all those years 20-30 years do all those phyllis 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 and they court in a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes 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 everyone of you would say I want a dark rich hearty roast so people always say when you asked Milly want in a coffee what do you like dark rich hearty roast what percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty roast according to Howard somewhere 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 she wanted I want a milky weak coffee so that's number one thing that Howard did number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize it'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 eighties they were obsessed with mustard in particularly are obsessed with the story of great burp all right used to be there were two mustards French's and gold's 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 evaldo brown mustard seed some white wine a nose hid much more delicate aromatics and what did they do they put it in a little tiny glass jar with wonderful enameled label on it may it look French even though it's made in Oxnard California and instead of charging a dollar 50 for the 8 ounce can the way the dry-towns bottle the way that French's and Gulden's did they decided to charge four dollars and then they had those ads right with a guy in the Rolls Royce and he's eating the Grey Poupon other rolls-royce pulls up but he says do you have any Grey Poupon and the whole thing after they did that Grey Poupon 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 a boar sophistication and culture and meaning and Howard looked at that and said that's wrong master 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 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 Chez Panisse 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 Chez Panisse has the 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 raghu's which had no visible solids right which were thin you just put a little bit over there and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta that's what it was and why will we attach 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 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 were 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 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 believe that but even took it a second step which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food we are just making an error we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice an example he used was coffee and coffee is something he did a lot of work with with Nescafe if I were to 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 0 to 100 if however you allowed me to break you into cost coffee clusters maybe three or four copy clusters and I could make coffee just from 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

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 82,806

Rating: 4.9505663 out of 5

Keywords: \Malcolm Gladwell\, \Tipping, Point\, \Blink\, \Outliers\, \food, industry\, \spaghetti, sauce\, choice, happiness, psychology, TED, TED-Ed, TEDEducation, \TED, Ed\

Id: VkhFh5Ms1vc

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2013