What is happiness? How is it different
from the other feelings we get? Why do different things make different people
happy in different situations? As for me, enthralling my readers with my
writings makes me happy. For you, may be, your favourite dish served hot in
front of you makes you happy. Speaking of food, I’m sure you can recollect
twirling those long strands of spaghetti in your fork and savouring them with
the zesty sauce that comes with it. So what I am going to talk about today is a
little different from what I’ve talked about before - the reinvention of
spaghetti sauce. This is credited to the famous American market researcher and
psychophysicist – Dr. Howard Moskowitz.
A doctorate from Harvard University, Dr. Moskowitz
had a consulting business in White Plains, New York, and one of his very first
clients was Pepsi, back in the early 70s. This was a time, when the sugar
substitute – aspartame was getting increasingly popular and Pepsi wanted to use
it in their latest offering – Diet Pepsi. They wanted Dr. Moskowitz to figure
out how much aspartame should each can of Pepsi contain in order to qualify as
the perfect drink. A little too detailed, you might think, but this is what big
companies do. They conduct immense research in order to make the perfect
product.
That’s what Howard was famous for doing.
He was told that he had to work in a band of 8 to 12% sweetness, where anything
below 8% sweetness wasn’t sweet enough, and anything above 12% sweetness was
too sweet, and he had to find the sweet spot between 8 and 12%. Now what most
of us would do, is take various cans of Pepsi with sweetness varying from 8,
8.1, 8.2 until 12, test it on thousands of drinkers, plot the results on a
curve, and find out which is the most popular concentration based on the
ratings given. That’s what Howard did, and what he found startled him. The data
did not form a perfect bell-shaped curve, and was a complete mess.
Now this is not uncommon in the food
industry. Often researchers believe that may be they asked the wrong people, at
the wrong time, or may be made some errors on the way. Commoners like us
would’ve taken a calculated guess and pointed at 10% aspartame in this
situation. But Dr. Howard Moskowitz is no common researcher. The question
bothered him for years as to why he couldn’t find an answer for Diet Pepsi.
Then one day, while sitting in a diner in
White Plains, before he was going for some work for Nescafe, the answer came to
him in a lightning bolt of a revelation. He realized that what they did wrong
was that they were looking for the ‘Perfect Pepsi’ – the perfect drink, while
they should’ve been looking for the ‘Perfect Pepsis’. And this was a path
breaking revelation in the history of food science. Howard went all over the
place sharing his revelation to people who branded him as crazy. Nobody hired
him, but that did less to dampen his zeal and obsession with it.
His efforts finally met success when Classic
Pickles came to him and said that they wanted to make the ‘perfect pickle’, to
which, he very predictably responded that there is no ‘perfect pickle’, there
are ‘perfect pickles’. He told them that they needed to make their pickles
zesty, and that’s when the world tasted zesty pickles.
His next client is even more important –
The Campbell Soup Company. This is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell
Soup made Prego, the trade mark brand name pasta sauce, which was struggling
against Ragu Sauce, in the 70s and 80s. Now it is quite well known in the
industry that Prego is a much better sauce, with its perfect mixture of spices
and the fact that it blends beautifully with pasta, as was proven by the famous
bowl test. But despite this, they were in trouble, and that is when Howard came
to the rescue. What he did to this ‘dead tomato sauce’ was that he went to the
Campbell Soup kitchen and made over 45 different varieties of tomato sauce, and
he varied them in every way that you could possibly think of – sourness, level
of garlic, tartness, what have you. He took these sauces to New York, Chicago
etc., sat truckloads of people down into a hall with a bowl of pasta for each
with his varieties of sauce and asked them to rate on a scale of 0 to 100 about
how good they thought the sauce was.
Now, after months of this activity, he had
a mountain load of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti
sauce. Now would he look for the perfect pasta sauce? No, Howard doesn’t
believe that there can be only one. Instead, he grouped this data into clusters
to see if a pattern emerges, and it sure did. He found that there are three
types of Americans when it comes to spaghetti sauce – there are people who like
it plain, those who like it spicy and those who like it “extra chunky”. The
third type – “extra chunky” sauce was nowhere to be found in the American
supermarkets of the 1980s.
So the revelation was that there are
one-third of Americans who crave for “extra chunky” sauce, yet no one is
servicing their needs! And then, the “extra chunky” line of sauces that Prego
came up with earned them $600 million over the next ten years.
Once everyone else in the industry
realised this, we started having 7 different kinds of vinegar, 14 different
kinds of mustard and 71 different kinds of olive oil. Guess what, Ragu
eventually hired Howard to do the same for them, and what we ended up getting
was 36 different red sauces in Germany, in six varieties, one of which was
“extra chunky”. That is Dr. Moskowitz’s gift to the world. It has changed the
way the food industry things about making us ‘happy’.
It broke a lot of myths, one being that
the best way to know what people want is to ask them. For years people were
asked to sit down in focus groups and were asked how they liked their spaghetti
sauce. And surprisingly, no one ever mentioned that they wanted “extra chunky”
sauce. People don’t know what they want. As Howard says, “The mind knows not
what the tongue wants”, and the most important step to know what we want is to
admit that we cannot always explain what we want.
The second realisation that comes from this
research is the phenomenon of horizontal segmentation and its importance in the
food industry. This broke the myth that the product that works in the market is
something that makes people aspire to want it, to ascend to a class that can
afford it and enjoy it, which the rest of the world cannot. But food does not
exist on a hierarchy. It exists in a horizontal plane. There is no ‘best
mustard sauce’ or ‘best tomato sauce’. There are different kinds of sauces.
Thus, Dr. Moskowitz successfully democratised the way we think about taste.
And the third thing that the world owes
Dr. Moskowitz is his confrontation of the ‘Platonic Dish’. The belief that a
certain dish could be cooked best only in one way is what changed after this
research. Even the food industry had a platonic notion of what a tomato sauce
was, which came from the thin, ‘authentic’ Italian sauce in the 1970s. It was
assumed that people liked only the most authentic, traditional dishes. The
cooking industry treated all of us in the same way. But that changed from the
‘search for universals’ to ‘understanding variability’, all thanks to the
progress in science over the last few decades. Just as in genetics, Dr.
Moskowitz brought the same variability in food science. When we try to bring
the same universality in food, we’re not only making an error but also doing
ourselves a massive disservice.
The
example he used is of coffee. If all of you are asked to brew a coffee that
makes all of you happy, and then rate it on a scale of 0 to 100, it might score
a 60. If instead, you are divided into small coffee clusters and asked to do
the same for your own cluster, your rating will go from 60 to 75-78. The
difference between 60 and 75 is the difference between coffee that makes you
wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy – the ultimate coffee. And
that is the most beautiful lesson we can learn from Dr. Howard Moskowitz, that
the sure way to happiness lies in embracing our diversity. 
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