Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce | Malcolm Gladwell
I think I was supposedto talk about my new book,
which is called "Blink,"
and it's about snap judgmentsand first impressions.
And it comes out in January,and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.
(Laughter)
But I was thinking about this,
and I realized that althoughmy new book makes me happy,
and I think would 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 muchto make Americans happy
as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years,
a man who is a greatpersonal hero of mine:
someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz,
who is most famousfor reinventing spaghetti sauce.
Howard's 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 wonderfulexuberance and vitality,
and he has a parrot,and he loves the opera,
and he's a great aficionadoof medieval history.
And by profession, he's a psychophysicist.
Now, I should tell you that I have no ideawhat psychophysics is,
although at some point in my life,
I dated a girl for two years
who was gettingher doctorate in psychophysics.
Which should tell you somethingabout that relationship.
(Laughter)
As far as I know, psychophysicsis about measuring things.
And Howard is very interestedin measuring things.
And he graduatedwith his doctorate from Harvard,
and he set up a little consulting shopin White Plains, New York.
And one of his first clients was Pepsi.
This is many years ago,back in the early 70s.
And Pepsi came to Howard and they said,
"You know, there's this newthing called aspartame,
and we would like to make Diet Pepsi.
We'd like you to figure out
how much aspartame we should putin each can of Diet Pepsi
in order to have the perfect drink."
Now that sounds like an incrediblystraightforward question to answer,
and that's what Howard thought.
Because Pepsi told him,
"We're working with a bandbetween eight and 12 percent.
Anything below eight percentsweetness is not sweet enough;
anything above 12 percentsweetness is too sweet.
We want to know: what's the sweetspot 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 upa big experimental batch of Pepsi,
at every degree of sweetness --eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3,
all the way up to 12 --
and we try this outwith thousands of people,
and we plot the results on a curve,
and we take the most popularconcentration, 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 realizesit'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.
Now, most people in that business,in the world of testing food and such,
are not dismayedwhen the data comes back a mess.
They think, "Well, you know,
figuring out what people thinkabout cola's not that easy."
"You know, maybe we made an errorsomewhere along the way."
"You know, let's justmake an educated guess,"
and they simply pointand they go for 10 percent,
right in the middle.
Howard is not so easily placated.
Howard is a man of a certain degreeof intellectual standards.
And this was not good enough for him,
and this question bedeviled him for years.
And he would think it throughand say, "What was wrong?
Why could we not make senseof this experiment with Diet Pepsi?"
And one day, he was sittingin a diner in White Plains,
about to go trying to dream upsome work for Nescafé.
And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning,the answer came to him.
And that is, that when they analyzedthe Diet Pepsi data,
they were asking the wrong question.
They were looking for the perfect Pepsi,
and they should have beenlooking for the perfect Pepsis.
Trust me.
This was an enormous revelation.
This was one of the most brilliantbreakthroughs in all of food science.
Howard immediately went on the road,
and he would go to conferencesaround the country,
and he would stand up and say,
"You had been lookingfor the perfect Pepsi.
You're wrong.
You should be lookingfor the perfect Pepsis."
And people would look at himblankly and say,
"What are you talking about? Craziness."
And they would say, "Move! Next!"
Tried to get business,nobody would hire him --
he was obsessed, though,
and he talked about itand talked about it.
Howard loves the Yiddish expression
"To a worm in horseradish,the world is horseradish."
This was his horseradish.
(Laughter)
He was obsessed with it!
And finally, he had a breakthrough.
Vlasic Pickles came to him,
and they said, "Doctor 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 needto improve your regular;
you need to create zesty."
And that's where we got zesty pickles.
Then the next person came to him:Campbell's Soup.
And this was even more important.
In fact, Campbell's Soupis where Howard made his reputation.
Campbell's made Prego,
and Prego, in the early 80s,was struggling next to Ragù,
which was the dominantspaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s.
In the industry -- I don'tknow 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 Ragù.
The quality of the tomato pasteis much better;
the spice mix is far superior;
it adheres to the pastain a much more pleasing way.
In fact, they would dothe famous bowl test
back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego.
You'd have a plate of spaghetti,and you would pour it on, right?
And the Ragù would all go to the bottom,and the Prego would sit on top.
That's called "adherence."
And, anyway, despite the factthat 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 lookedat their product line, and he said,
what you have is a dead tomato society.
So he said, this is what I want to do.
And he got togetherwith the Campbell's soup kitchen,
and he made 45 varietiesof spaghetti sauce.
And he varied them accordingto every conceivable way
that you can vary tomato sauce:
by sweetness, by level of garlic,
by tomatoey-ness,by tartness, by sourness,
by visible solids --
my favorite termin the spaghetti sauce business.
(Laughter)
Every conceivable wayyou can vary spaghetti sauce,
he varied spaghetti sauce.
And then he took this whole raftof 45 spaghetti sauces,
and he went on the road.
He went to New York, to Chicago,
he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles.
And he brought in peopleby the truckload into big halls.
And he sat them down for two hours,
and over the course of that two hours,he gave them ten bowls.
Ten small bowls of pasta,
with a different spaghettisauce on each one.
And after they ate each bowl,they had to rate, from 0 to 100,
how good they thoughtthe 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 peoplefeel about spaghetti sauce.
And then he analyzed the data.
Did he look for the most popularvariety of spaghetti sauce?
No! Howard doesn't believethat there is such a thing.
Instead, he lookedat the data, and he said,
let's see if we can group all thesedifferent data points into clusters.
Let's see if they congregatearound certain ideas.
And sure enough, if you sit down,
and you analyze all this dataon spaghetti sauce,
you realize that all Americansfall into one of three groups.
There are peoplewho like their spaghetti sauce plain;
there are peoplewho like their spaghetti sauce spicy;
and there are peoplewho 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 findextra-chunky spaghetti sauce.
And Prego turned to Howard, and they said,
"You're telling methat one third of Americans
crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce
and yet no one is servicing their needs?"
And he said "Yes!"
(Laughter)
And Prego then went back,
and completely reformulatedtheir spaghetti sauce,
and came out with a line of extra chunkythat immediately and completely
took over the spaghetti saucebusiness in this country.
And over the next 10 years,they made 600 million dollars
off their line of extra-chunky sauces.
Everyone else in the industry lookedat what Howard had done, and they said,
"Oh my god! We've beenthinking all wrong!"
And that's when you started to getseven different kinds of vinegar,
and 14 different kinds of mustard,and 71 different kinds of olive oil.
And then eventuallyeven Ragù hired Howard,
and Howard did the exact same thingfor Ragù that he did for Prego.
And today, if you goto a really good supermarket,
do you know how many Ragùs there are?
36!
In six varieties:
Cheese, Light,
Robusto, Rich & Hearty,
Old World Traditional --
Extra-Chunky Garden.
(Laughter)
That's Howard's doing.
That is Howard's giftto the American people.
Now why is that important?
(Laughter)
It is, in fact, enormously important.
I'll explain to you why.
What Howard did is he fundamentallychanged the way the food industry thinks
about making you happy.
Assumption number onein the food industry used to be
that the way to find outwhat people want to eat,
what will make people happy,is to ask them.
And for years and years and years,
Ragù and Prego would have focus groups,
and they would sit you down,and they would say,
"What do you want in a spaghetti sauce?
Tell us what you wantin a 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.
(Laughter)
People don't know what they want!
As Howard loves to say,
"The mind knows notwhat the tongue wants."
It's a mystery!
(Laughter)
And a critically important step
in understandingour own desires and tastes
is to realize that we cannot alwaysexplain what we want, deep down.
If I asked all of you, for example,in this room, what you want in a coffee,
you know what you'd say?
Every one of you would say,"I want a dark, rich, hearty roast."
It's what people always saywhen you ask them.
"What do you like?""Dark, rich, hearty roast!"
What percentage of you actuallylike a dark, rich, hearty roast?
According to Howard, somewherebetween 25 and 27 percent of you.
Most of you like milky, weak coffee.
(Laughter)
But you will never, ever sayto someone who asks you what you want
that "I want a milky, weak coffee."
So that's number one thingthat Howard did.
Number two thing that Howard didis he made us realize --
it's another very critical point --
he made us realize the importance
of what he likes to call"horizontal segmentation."
Why is this critical?
Because this is the way the food industrythought before Howard.
What were they obsessed within the early 80s?
They were obsessed with mustard.
In particular, they were obsessedwith the story of Grey Poupon.
Used to be, there were two mustards:French's and Gulden's.
What were they? Yellow mustard.
What's in it?
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 a wonderful enameled label on it,
made it look French,
even though it's madein Oxnard, California.
(Laughter)
And instead of charging a dollar fiftyfor the eight-ounce bottle,
the way that French's and Gulden's did,
they decided to charge four dollars.
And they had those ads.
With the guy in the Rolls Royce,eating the Grey Poupon.
Another pulls up, and says,"Do you have any Grey Poupon?"
And the whole thing, after they did that,Grey Poupon takes off!
Takes over the mustard business!
And everyone's take-home lesson from that
was that the way to make people happy
is to give them somethingthat is more expensive,
something to aspire to.
It's to make them turn their backon what they think they like now,
and reach out for somethinghigher up the mustard hierarchy.
(Laughter)
A better mustard!A more expensive mustard!
A mustard of more sophisticationand culture and meaning.
And Howard looked to thatand 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 mustardor imperfect mustard.
There are only different kinds of mustardsthat suit different kinds of people.
He fundamentally democratizedthe way we think about taste.
And for that, as well, we oweHoward Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.
Third thing that Howard did,and perhaps the most important,
is Howard confronted the notionof the Platonic dish.
(Laughter)
What do I mean by that?
(Laughter)
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 sashimiwith roasted pumpkin seeds
in a something something reduction.
They don't give you five optionson the reduction.
They don't say, "Do you wantthe extra-chunky reduction, or ...?"
No!
You just get the reduction. Why?
Because the chef at Chez Panisse
has a Platonic notionabout red-tail sashimi.
"This is the way it ought to be."
And she serves it that waytime 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 bein this restaurant."
Now that same idea fueledthe commercial food industry as well.
They had a Platonic notionof 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 "authentictomato sauce" in the 1970s,
we talked about Italian tomato sauce,
we talked about the earliest Ragùs,
which had no visible solids, right?
Which were thin, you just put a little bit
and it sunk down to the bottomof the pasta.
That's what it was.
And why were we attached to that?
Because we thoughtthat what it took to make people happy
was to provide them with the mostculturally authentic tomato sauce, A.
And B, we thought that if we gave themthe culturally authentic tomato sauce,
then they would embrace it.
And that's what would pleasethe maximum number of people.
In other words,
people in the cooking worldwere looking for cooking universals.
They were looking for one wayto treat all of us.
And it's good reason for themto be obsessed
with the idea of universals,
because all of science,
through the 19th centuryand much of the 20th,
was obsessed with universals.
Psychologists, medical scientists,economists
were all interestedin finding out the rules
that govern the way all of us behave.
But that changed, right?
What is the great revolutionin science of the last 10, 15 years?
It is the movementfrom the search for universals
to the understanding of variability.
Now in medical science,we don't want to know, necessarily,
just how cancer works,
we want to know how your canceris different from my cancer.
I guess my cancer differentfrom your cancer.
Genetics has opened the doorto the study of human variability.
What Howard Moskowitzwas doing was saying,
"This same revolution needs to happenin the world of tomato sauce."
And for that, we owe hima great vote of thanks.
I'll give you one lastillustration of variability,
and that is -- oh, I'm sorry.
Howard not only believed that,but he took it a second step,
which was to say that when we pursueuniversal principles in food,
we aren't just making an error;
we are actually doing ourselvesa massive disservice.
And the example he used was coffee.
And coffee is something he dida lot of work with, with Nescafé.
If I were to ask all of you to tryand 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 coffeewould be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100.
If, however, you allowed meto break you into coffee clusters,
maybe three or four coffee clusters,
and I could make coffee justfor each of those individual clusters,
your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78.
The difference between coffeeat 60 and coffee at 78
is a difference between coffeethat makes you wince,
and coffee that makes youdeliriously happy.
That is the final, and I thinkmost beautiful lesson,
of Howard Moskowitz:
that in embracing the diversityof human beings,
we will find a surer wayto true happiness.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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