What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures Page 4
In the studio, Ron had set up eighteen Digital Jog Dial Showtimes on five wood-paneled gurneys. From Los Angeles, he had sent, via Federal Express, dozens of Styrofoam containers with enough meat for each of the day’s airings: eight fifteen-pound turkeys, seventy-two hamburgers, eight legs of lamb, eight ducks, thirty-odd chickens, two dozen or so Rock Cornish game hens, and on and on, supplementing them with garnishes, trout, and some sausage bought that morning at three Philadelphia-area supermarkets. QVC’s target was thirty-seven thousand machines, meaning that it hoped to gross about $4.5 million during the twenty-four hours — a huge day, even by the network’s standards. Ron seemed tense. He barked at the team of QVC producers and cameramen bustling around the room. He fussed over the hero plates — the ready-made dinners that he would use to showcase meat taken straight from the oven. “Guys, this is impossible,” he said, peering at a tray of mashed potatoes and gravy. “The level of gravy must be higher.” He was limping a little. “You know, there’s a lot of pressure on you,” he said wearily. “ ‘How did Ron do? Is he still the best?’ ”
With just a few minutes to go, Ron ducked into the greenroom next to the studio to put GLH in his hair: a few aerosol bursts, followed by vigorous brushing. “Where is God right now?” his co-host, Rick Domeier, yelled out, looking around theatrically for his guest star. “Is God backstage?” Ron then appeared, resplendent in a chef’s coat, and the cameras began to roll. He sliced open a leg of lamb. He played with the dial of the new digital Showtime. He admired the crispy, succulent skin of the duck. He discussed the virtues of the new food-warming feature — where the machine would rotate at low heat for up to four hours after the meat was cooked in order to keep the juices moving — and, all the while, bantered so convincingly with viewers calling in on the testimonial line that it was as if he were back mesmerizing the secretaries in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington.
In the greenroom, there were two computer monitors. The first displayed a line graph charting the number of calls that came in at any given second. The second was an electronic ledger showing the total sales up to that point. As Ron took flight, one by one, people left the studio to gather around the computers. Shannon Popeil came first. It was 12:40 a.m. In the studio, Ron was slicing onions with one of his father’s Dial-O-Matics. She looked at the second monitor and gave a little gasp. Forty minutes in, and Ron had already passed $700,000. A QVC manager walked in. It was 12:48 a.m., and Ron was roaring on: $837,650. “It can’t be!” he cried out. “That’s unbelievable!” Two QVC producers came over. One of them pointed at the first monitor, which was graphing the call volume. “Jump,” he called out. “Jump!” There were only a few minutes left. Ron was extolling the virtues of the oven one final time, and, sure enough, the line began to take a sharp turn upward, as all over America viewers took out their wallets. The numbers on the second screen began to change in a blur of recalculation — rising in increments of $129.72 plus shipping and taxes. “You know, we’re going to hit a million dollars, just on the first hour,” one of the QVC guys said, and there was awe in his voice. It was one thing to talk about how Ron was the best there ever was, after all, but quite another to see proof of it, before your very eyes. At that moment, on the other side of the room, the door opened, and a man appeared, stooped and drawn but with a smile on his face. It was Ron Popeil, who invented a better rotisserie in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself. There was a hush, and then the whole room stood up and cheered.*
October 30, 2000
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 has that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.
So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enameled 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 backseat 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 40 to 50 percent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by 40 to 50 percent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. By the end of the 1980s 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 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 your life!” 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 8 percent sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over 12 percent was too sweet. So Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness — 8 percent, 8.25 percent, 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 or 1990 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful.”
It may be hard today, twenty 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. 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 Mosko-witz’s program, the three spaghetti-sauce groups were labeled Segment 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 10 points, to 68. “See what happens?” he said. “If I make one group happier, I piss 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.