On spaghetti sauce - Malcolm Gladwell

[Music] [Music] 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. 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, um, 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—someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz. 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. He has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality. He keeps a—has a parrot and he loves the opera and he's a great aficionado of, of, uh, medieval history. 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 2 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. He graduated with his doctorate from Harvard and he set up a little consulting shop in, um, White Plains, New York.

One of his first clients was—this is many years ago—back in the early '70s. One of his first clients was Pepsi. Pepsi came to Howard and they said, “You know, 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.”

Right now, that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought, because Pepsi told him, “Look, we’re working with a band between 8 and 12%. 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 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, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden, he realizes it's not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense; it’s a mess. It's all over the place, right? 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 cola 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 go for 10%, right in the middle.

Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards, and this was not good enough for him. This question beveled 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?”

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. 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.

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 Pepsis.” People would look at him with a blank look and they would say, “What are you talking about? Just craziness!” They would say, “You know, move next!” Tried 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. Vasic Pickles came to him and they said, “Mr. Moskowitz—Dr. Moskowitz—we want to make the perfect pickle.”

He said, “There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles.” 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 Soup. This was even more important. In fact, Campbell Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell 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 might have to go into this, but technically speaking, this is a side—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 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.

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.” Howard looked at their product line and he said, “What you have is a dead tomato society.”

So he said, “Here is what I want to do.” He got together with the Campbell Soup kitchen and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. 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, by visible solids—my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce.

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. He sat them down for 2 hours. They gave them over the course of that two hours 10 bowls—10 small bowls of pasta with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. After they ate each bowl, they were asked 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 all these different data points into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas.” And sure enough, if you sit