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"The mind knows not what the tongue wants."
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Howard Moskowitz is a psychophysicist who loves measuring things. About 40 years ago, pasta sauce brand Prego asked him to fix its failing pasta sauce so it could match up to Ragu.
He tested and analyzed people's spaghetti sauce preferences by giving them bowls of pasta. Then - instead of looking for the most popular sauce - he looked for trends.
"The mind knows not
what the tongue wants."
single, perfect way
Howard then rebutted the idea of the "platonic dish," that there is a to make food. He said that everyone has different tastes and different needs to be satisfied.
"We thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people."
"When we pursue universal principles in food, we aren't just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice."
Take coffee, for example. If we all thought of a coffee brand and rated it on a scale of 0 to 100, the average score would be 60.
But if everyone was broken into coffee clusters tailored to their particular wants, scores would rise from 60 to about 75 -
"a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy."
- Howard Moskowitz
"That is the final, and I think, most beautiful, lesson of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness."
The simple happiness of
spaghetti sauce
It was a simple concept, really, but Moskowitz "fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy."
Asking people what they want in their spaghetti sauce is fruitless because, as he realized,
people don't know what they want.
"Most of you like weak, milky coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you want you want that 'I want a weak, milky coffee.'"
from a 2004 TED Talk titled "Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce" by Malcolm Gladwell
He found three major spaghetti sauce preference groups through this analysis:
plain
People who like spaghetti sauce,
spicy
people who like spaghetti sauce and
extra-chunky
people who like spaghetti sauce.