The Perfect Spaghetti Sauce

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink, did a TED talk back in 2004 about happiness. He begins talking about a psychophysicist by the name of Howard Moskowitz who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. Howard set up a consulting shop. one of his first clients was Pepsi back in the early 70s and they wanted to make a diet Pepsi. they needed Howard to tell them how much artificial sweetener to put in. they tell him that the perfect amount of aspartame to add is between 8% and 12% sweetener. the common sense thing to do is to in this case is to set up a bunch of test cups with Pepsi containing all percents of sweetener from 8% all the way to 12% and then have people try them and record every ones favorite. then you would take those results and plot them on a bell graph and find the amount of aspartame that was favoured the most. Howard did just that only he was shocked when the results on the bell curve made no sense. the data was all over the place. most people in that business figure that this is not an easy task and so they just say well 10% is good enough. one day the answer struck him like a bolt of lightening. when they analysed the 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. he went all over the country telling people about his brilliant idea and no one listened. He couldn't find work after that. Vlasic pickles came to him one day saying they want to make the perfect pickle and he said that there is no perfect pickle there are only perfect pickles. he came back and said don't just make a regular pickle, make a zesty one too. then Campbell's soup came to him. Campbell's makes Prego sauce which was struggling at that time although they were actually the superior sauce. he got together with the Campbell soup people and created 45 varieties of sauce of varied sweetness and garlic levels and other factors. he varied the sauces in every conceivable way. he then went on the road with the sauces and got truck loads of people to try them. he had the testers rate each bowl from 1-100 as to how much they liked it. Howard did this for months, gathering a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. Instead of looking for the most popular he looked to see if he could group the sauces into clusters. He noticed there were three groups. People who like plain sauce, spicy sauce and a good majority favoured extra chunky sauce. Prego took that data and made an extra chunky sauce that had not been done before and it really sold. Today you can find any kind of sauce you like. The difference is that no one had asked what the people wanted in a sauce. But we can not always explain what we want. There is no good sauce or bad sauce or perfect sauce or imperfect sauce there are only different kinds of sauce that suit different kinds of people. People in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. Before the different varieties they thought that what made people happy was the most culturally authentic Italian sauce. That has changed from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. In embracing the diversity of human beings we will find a sure way to true happiness.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html