[This was originally published in the _New Yorker_...]

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html


September 6, 2004
TASTE TECHNOLOGIES

The Ketchup Conundrum

Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?


1.

"Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French's. It
came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a
yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and
vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard
in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods
section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more
pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more
than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was
or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to
French's or the runner-up, Gulden's. Then one day the Heublein Company,
which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people
a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once
to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens;
even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have
that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelled label
and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still
being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian
mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale
food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed
them with airplane meals--which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they
hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest
budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is
driving down a country road. There's a man in the back seat in a suit with a
plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the
glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the "reveal."
The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up
alongside. A man leans his head out the window. "Pardon me. Would you have
any Grey Poupon?"

In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty
per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by
forty to fifty per cent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to
French's and Gulden's. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was
the most powerful brand in mustard. "The tagline in the commercial was that
this was one of life's finer pleasures," Larry Elegant, who wrote the
original Grey Poupon spot, says, "and that, along with the Rolls-Royce,
seemed to impart to people's minds that this was something truly different
and superior."

The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was
willing to pay more--in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight
ounces--as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of
sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that
the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard
had always been yellow didn't mean that consumers would use only yellow
mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket
today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a
man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business.
Isn't the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago?
There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt's and Del Monte and a handful of
private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.

Wigon is from Boston. He's a thickset man in his early fifties, with a full
salt-and-pepper beard. He runs his ketchup business--under the brand World's
Best Ketchup--out of the catering business of his partner, Nick Schiarizzi,
in Norwood, Massachusetts, just off Route 1, in a low-slung building behind
an industrial-equipment-rental shop. He starts with red peppers, Spanish
onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand,
because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He uses maple syrup, not
corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. He pours his
ketchup into a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sells it for three times the
price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has crisscrossed the country,
peddling World's Best in six flavors--regular, sweet, dill, garlic,
caramelized onion, and basil--to specialty grocery stores and supermarkets.
If you were in Zabar's on Manhattan's Upper West Side a few months ago, you
would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi
and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World's Best baseball cap, a white
shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a
silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of
toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. "Try my ketchup!"
Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. "If you don't try it,
you're doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life."

In the same aisle at Zabar's that day two other demonstrations were going
on, so that people were starting at one end with free chicken sausage,
sampling a slice of prosciutto, and then pausing at the World's Best stand
before heading for the cash register. They would look down at the array of
open jars, and Wigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one
of his ketchups, and hand it to them with a flourish. The ratio of tomato
solids to liquid in World's Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple
syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick. Invariably, people would close
their eyes, just for a moment, and do a subtle double take. Some of them
would look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick
up a jar. "You know why you like it so much?" he would say, in his broad
Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. "Because you've
been eating bad ketchup all " Jim Wigon had a simple vision: build a better
ketchup--the way Grey Poupon built a better mustard--and the world will beat
a path to your door. If only it were that easy.

2.

The story of World's Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from
White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short
and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he
favors the Socratic monologue--a series of questions that he poses to
himself, then answers, punctuated by "ahhh" and much vigorous nodding. He is
a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known
as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral
dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his
food-testing and market-research business are named after famous
psychophysicists. ("Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn?
Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn
kitchen.") Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if
he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a
statistician. "My favorite writer? Gibbon," he burst out, when we met not
long ago. He had just been holding forth on the subject of sodium solutions.
"Right now I'm working my way through the Hales history of the Byzantine
Empire. Holy shit! Everything is easy until you get to the Byzantine Empire.
It's impossible. One emperor is always killing the others, and everyone has
five wives or three husbands. It's very Byzantine."

Moskowitz set up shop in the seventies, and one of his first clients was
Pepsi. The artificial sweetener aspartame had just become available, and
Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a
can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below eight per cent sweetness
was not sweet enough and anything over twelve per cent was too sweet. So
Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches of Diet
Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness--8 per cent, 8.25 per cent,
8.5, and on and on up to 12--gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for
the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a
mess--there wasn't a pattern--and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz
realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such
thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the
perfect Diet Pepsis.

It took a long time for the food world to catch up with Howard Moskowitz. He
knocked on doors and tried to explain his idea about the plural nature of
perfection, and no one answered. He spoke at food-industry conferences, and
audiences shrugged. But he could think of nothing else. "It's like that
Yiddish expression," he says. "Do you know it? To a worm in horseradish, the
world is horseradish!" Then, in 1986, he got a call from the Campbell's Soup
Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú
with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced
tomatoes as opposed to Ragú's purée, and, Campbell's thought, had better
pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell's was
desperate for new ideas.

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus
group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not
believe that consumers--even spaghetti lovers--know what they desire if what
they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying,
"knows not what the tongue wants." Instead, working with the Campbell's
kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These
were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness,
tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and
so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those
varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road--to New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville--and asked people in groups of
twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti
sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When
Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different
definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted
carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz
learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups:
plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most
important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti
sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to
be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. "We all said, 'Wow!' "
Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell's,
recalls. "Here there was this third segment--people who liked their
spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it--and it was completely untapped. So
in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily
successful."

It may be hard today, fifteen years later--when every brand seems to come in
multiple varieties--to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In
those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the
notion of a platonic dish--the version of a dish that looked and tasted
absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic
spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended
because that's the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the
industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once
you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old
orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists
and said there are no universals.

Moskowitz still has a version of the computer model he used for Prego
fifteen years ago. It has all the coded results from the consumer taste
tests and the expert tastings, split into the three categories (plain,
spicy, and extra-chunky) and linked up with the actual ingredients list on a
spreadsheet. "You know how they have a computer model for building an
aircraft," Moskowitz said as he pulled up the program on his computer. "This
is a model for building spaghetti sauce. Look, every variable is here." He
pointed at column after column of ratings. "So here are the ingredients. I'm
a brand manager for Prego. I want to optimize one of the segments. Let's
start with Segment 1." In Moskowitz's program, the three spaghetti-sauce
groups were labelledSegment 1, Segment 2, and Segment 3. He typed in a few
commands, instructing the computer to give him the formulation that would
score the highest with those people in Segment 1. The answer appeared almost
immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz's data, produced
a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1. But that same formulation didn't
do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it 67
and 57, respectively. Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer
to optimize for Segment 2. This time the ratings came in at 82, but now
Segment 1 had fallen ten points, to 68. "See what happens?" he said. "If I
make one group happier, I **** off another group. We did this for coffee
with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the
best you can get across all the segments is a 60--if you're lucky. That's if
you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory
segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It's a very big
difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you'll die for."

When Jim Wigon set up shop that day in Zabar's, then, his operating
assumption was that there ought to be some segment of the population that
preferred a ketchup made with Stanislaus tomato paste and hand-chopped basil
and maple syrup. That's the Moskowitz theory. But there is theory and there
is practice. By the end of that long day, Wigon had sold ninety jars. But
he'd also got two parking tickets and had to pay for a hotel room, so he
wasn't going home with money in his pocket. For the year, Wigon estimates,
he'll sell fifty thousand jars--which, in the universe of condiments, is no
more than a blip. "I haven't drawn a paycheck in five years," Wigon said as
he impaled another meatball on a toothpick. "My wife is killing me." And it
isn't just World's Best that is struggling. In the gourmet-ketchup world,
there is River Run and Uncle Dave's, from Vermont, and Muir Glen Organic and
Mrs. Tomato Head Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Catsup, in California, and dozens
of others--and every year Heinz's overwhelming share of the ketchup market
just grows.

It is possible, of course, that ketchup is waiting for its own version of
that Rolls-Royce commercial, or the discovery of the ketchup equivalent of
extra-chunky--the magic formula that will satisfy an unmet need. It is also
possible, however, that the rules of Howard Moskowitz, which apply to Grey
Poupon and Prego spaghetti sauce and to olive oil and salad dressing and
virtually everything else in the supermarket, don't apply to ketchup.

3.

Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation--the union of the English
tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation
with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate
that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a
preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey
Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of
Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe,
and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half. On one
side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to
make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the
amounts used. On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup
manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved
with the application of culinary science. The dominant nineteenth-century
ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe
tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which
add body to a sauce. But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving
it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups
had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. The renegades
argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect
protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior
ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting. They offered a money-back
guarantee in the event of spoilage. They charged more for their product,
convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were
right. The benzoate ketchups disappeared. The leader of the renegade band
was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J. Heinz.

The world's leading expert on ketchup's early years is Andrew F. Smith, a
substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy
black hair. Smith is a scholar, trained as a political scientist, intent on
bringing rigor to the world of food. When we met for lunch not long ago at
the restaurant Savoy in SoHo (chosen because of the excellence of its
hamburger and French fries, and because Savoy makes its own ketchup--a dark,
peppery, and viscous variety served in a white porcelain saucer), Smith was
in the throes of examining the origins of the croissant for the upcoming
"Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America," of which he is the
editor-in-chief. Was the croissant invented in 1683, by the Viennese, in
celebration of their defeat of the invading Turks? Or in 1686, by the
residents of Budapest, to celebrate their defeat of the Turks? Both
explanations would explain its distinctive crescent shape--since it would
make a certain cultural sense (particularly for the Viennese) to consecrate
their battlefield triumphs in the form of pastry. But the only reference
Smith could find to either story was in the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938.
"It just doesn't check out," he said, shaking his head wearily.

Smith's specialty is the tomato, however, and over the course of many
scholarly articles and books--"The History of Home-Made Anglo-American
Tomato Ketchup," for Petits Propos Culinaires, for example, and "The Great
Tomato Pill War of the 1830's," for The Connecticut Historical Society
Bulletin--Smith has argued that some critical portion of the history of
culinary civilization could be told through this fruit. Cortez brought
tomatoes to Europe from the New World, and they inexorably insinuated
themselves into the world's cuisines. The Italians substituted the tomato
for eggplant. In northern India, it went into curries and chutneys. "The
biggest tomato producer in the world today?" Smith paused, for dramatic
effect. "China. You don't think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine,
and it wasn't ten years ago. But it is now." Smith dipped one of my French
fries into the homemade sauce. "It has that raw taste," he said, with a look
of intense concentration. "It's fresh ketchup. You can taste the tomato."
Ketchup was, to his mind, the most nearly perfect of all the tomato's
manifestations. It was inexpensive, which meant that it had a firm lock on
the mass market, and it was a condiment, not an ingredient, which meant that
it could be applied at the discretion of the food eater, not the food
preparer. "There's a quote from Elizabeth Rozin I've always loved," he said.
Rozin is the food theorist who wrote the essay "Ketchup and the Collective
Unconscious," and Smith used her conclusion as the epigraph of his ketchup
book: ketchup may well be "the only true culinary expression of the melting
pot, and . . . its special and unprecedented ability to provide something
for everyone makes it the Esperanto of cuisine." Here is where Henry Heinz
and the benzoate battle were so important: in defeating the condiment Old
Guard, he was the one who changed the flavor of ketchup in a way that made
it universal.

4.

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet,
sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken
soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy
sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary
Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia,
says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker--it
gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When
Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids,
he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he
dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had
twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of
the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the
concentration of sugar--so now ketchup was also sweet--and all along ketchup
had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup,
and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby
will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always
prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal
signals about the food we are eating--about how dense it is in calories, for
example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino
acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five
of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of
the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved
along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of
the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in
the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive
market-research project in which researchers went into people's homes and
watched the way they used ketchup. "I remember sitting in one of those
households," Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer
for Heinz, says. "There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what
happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was
a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and
Mom intercepted the bottle and said, 'No, you're not going to do that.' She
physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see
that the whole thing was a bummer." For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was
an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more
ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it
needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "If you are
four--and I have a four-year-old--he doesn't get to choose what he eats for
dinner, in most cases," Keller says. "But the one thing he can control is
ketchup. It's the one part of the food experience that he can customize and
personalize." As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt
bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the
EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per
cent.

There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend
to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes.
That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that
is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for
themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would
never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something
strange on his plate--tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts--and he wanted
to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted
to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because,
alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and
sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.

5.

Last February, Edgar Chambers IV, who runs the sensory-analysis center at
Kansas State University, conducted a joint assessment of World's Best and
Heinz. He has seventeen trained tasters on his staff, and they work for
academia and industry, answering the often difficult question of what a
given substance tastes like. It is demanding work. Immediately after
conducting the ketchup study, Chambers dispatched a team to Bangkok to do an
analysis of fruit--bananas, mangoes, rose apples, and sweet tamarind. Others
were detailed to soy and kimchi in South Korea, and Chambers's wife led a
delegation to Italy to analyze ice cream.

The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings.
Six tasters sat around a large, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle.
In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups, one filled with Heinz
ketchup and one filled with World's Best. They would work along fourteen
dimensions of flavor and texture, in accordance with the standard
fifteen-point scale used by the food world. The flavor components would be
divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by
the nose. A very ripe peach, for example, tastes sweet but it also smells
sweet--which is a very different aspect of sweetness. Vinegar has a sour
taste but also a pungency, a vapor that rises up the back of the nose and
fills the mouth when you breathe out. To aid in the rating process, the
tasters surrounded themselves with little bowls of sweet and sour and salty
solutions, and portions of Contadina tomato paste, Hunt's tomato sauce, and
Campbell's tomato juice, all of which represent different concentrations of
tomato-ness.

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers
assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use
to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the
mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference
between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano,"
Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with
the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to
have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake.
When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge
into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic,
high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those
private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. "The thing about Coke
and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a
vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says.
"They have beautiful notes--all flavors are in balance. It's very hard to do
that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it's"-- and here she made a
series of pik! pik! pik! sounds--"all the notes are kind of spiky, and
usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon.
Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to
vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a
big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."

Some of the cheaper ketchups are the same way. Ketchup aficionados say that
there's a disquieting unevenness to the tomato notes in Del Monte ketchup:
Tomatoes vary, in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid,
according to the seed variety used, the time of year they are harvested, the
soil in which they are grown, and the weather during the growing season.
Unless all those variables are tightly controlled, one batch of ketchup can
end up too watery and another can be too strong. Or try one of the numerous
private-label brands that make up the bottom of the ketchup market and pay
attention to the spice mix; you may well find yourself conscious of the
clove note or overwhelmed by a hit of garlic. Generic colas and ketchups
have what Moskowitz calls a hook--a sensory attribute that you can single
out, and ultimately tire of.

The tasting began with a plastic spoon. Upon consideration, it was decided
that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French
fries, so a batch of fries were cooked up, and distributed around the table.
Each tester, according to protocol, took the fries one by one, dipped them
into the cup--all the way, right to the bottom--bit off the portion covered
in ketchup, and then contemplated the evidence of their senses. For Heinz,
the critical flavor components--vinegar, salt, tomato I.D. (over-all
tomato-ness), sweet, and bitter--were judged to be present in roughly equal
concentrations, and those elements, in turn, were judged to be well blended.
The World's Best, though, "had a completely different view, a different
profile, from the Heinz," Chambers said. It had a much stronger hit of sweet
aromatics--4.0 to 2.5--and outstripped Heinz on tomato I.D. by a resounding
9 to 5.5. But there was less salt, and no discernible vinegar. "The other
comment from the panel was that these elements were really not blended at
all," Chambers went on. "The World's Best product had really low amplitude."
According to Joyce Buchholz, one of the panelists, when the group judged
aftertaste, "it seemed like a certain flavor would hang over longer in the
case of World's Best--that cooked-tomatoey flavor."

But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try
something dramatic, like substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, ramping up
the tomato solids. That made for an unusual and daring flavor. World's Best
Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvellous thing. But it
also meant that his ketchup wasn't as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he
was paying a heavy price in amplitude. "Our conclusion was mainly this,"
Buchholz said. "We felt that World's Best seemed to be more like a sauce."
She was trying to be helpful.

There is an exception, then, to the Moskowitz rule. Today there are
thirty-six varieties of Ragú spaghetti sauce, under six rubrics--Old World
Style, Chunky Garden Style, Robusto, Light, Cheese Creations, and Rich &
Meaty--which means that there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for
every man, woman, and child in America. Measured against the monotony that
confronted Howard Moskowitz twenty years ago, this is progress. Happiness,
in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the
infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that
sometimes happiness can be found in having what we've always had and
everyone else is having. "Back in the seventies, someone else--I think it
was Ragú--tried to do an 'Italian'-style ketchup," Moskowitz said. "They
failed miserably." It was a conundrum: what was true about a yellow
condiment that went on hot dogs was not true about a tomato condiment that
went on hamburgers, and what was true about tomato sauce when you added
visible solids and put it in a jar was somehow not true about tomato sauce
when you added vinegar and sugar and put it in a bottle. Moskowitz shrugged.
"I guess ketchup is ketchup."

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