Ketchup triggers, in equal measure, all five of the fundamental tastes; one food theorist calls it “the Esperanto of cuisine.”

TASTE TECHNOLOGIES

THE KETCHUP CONUNDRUM

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

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

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Many years ago, one mustard dom-inated 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 fromground white mustard seed with tur-meric and vinegar, which gave it a mild,slightly metallic taste. If you lookedhard in the grocery store, you might findsomething in the specialty-foods sec-tion called Grey Poupon,which was Dijonmustard, made from the more pun-gent brown mustard seed. In the earlyseventies, Grey Poupon was no morethan a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-yearbusiness. Few people knew what it wasor how it tasted, or had any particulardesire for an alternative to French’s orthe runner-up, Gulden’s. Then one daythe Heublein Company, which ownedGrey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mus-tard taste test, a significant number hadonly to try Grey Poupon once to switchfrom yellow mustard. In the food worldthat almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, onlyabout one in a hundred have that kindof conversion rate. Grey Poupon wasmagic.

So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelledlabel and enough of a whiff of French-ness to make it seem as if it were stillbeing made in Europe (it was made inHartford, Connecticut, from Canadianmustard seed and white wine). Thecompany ran tasteful print ads in up-scale food magazines. They put themustard in little foil packets and dis-tributed them with airplane meals—which was a brand-new idea at thetime. Then they hired the Manhat-tan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to dosomething, on a modest budget, for tele-vision. The agency came back with anidea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down acountry road.There’s a man in the backseat in a suit with a plate of beef on asilver tray. He nods to the chauffeur,who opens the glove compartment.Then comes what is known in the business as the “reveal.” The chauffeurhands back a jar of Grey Poupon. An-other Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. Aman leans his head out the window.“Pardon me. Would you have any GreyPoupon?”

In the cities where the ads ran, sales

of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty percent, and whenever Heublein boughtairtime in new cities sales jumped byforty to fifty per cent again. Grocerystores put Grey Poupon next to French’sand Gulden’s. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the mostpowerful brand in mustard.“The taglinein the commercial was that this was oneof life’s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant,who wrote the original Grey Pouponspot, says, “and that, along with theRolls-Royce, seemed to impart to peo-ple’s minds that this was something trulydifferent and superior.”

The rise of Grey Poupon provedthat the American supermarket shop-per was willing to pay more—in thiscase, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eightounces—as long as what they were buy-ing carried with it an air of sophistica-tion and complex aromatics. Its successshowed, furthermore, that the bound-aries of taste and custom were not fixed:that just because mustard had alwaysbeen yellow didn’t mean that consum-ers would use only yellow mustard. It isbecause of Grey Poupon that the stan-dard American supermarket today hasan entire mustard section. And it isbecause of Grey Poupon that a mannamed Jim Wigon decided, four yearsago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn’tthe ketchup business today exactly wheremustard was thirty years ago? There isHeinz and, far behind, Hunt’s and DelMonte and a handful of private-labelbrands. Jim Wigon wanted to createthe Grey Poupon of ketchup.

Wigon is from Boston. He’s a thick-set man in his early fifties, with a fullsalt-and-pepper beard. He runs hisketchup business—under the brandWorld’s Best Ketchup—out of the ca-tering business of his partner, NickSchiarizzi, in Norwood, Massachusetts,just off Route 1, in a low-slung buildingbehind an industrial-equipment-rentalshop. He starts with red peppers, Span-ish onions, garlic, and a high-endtomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand,because the buffalo chopper bruises theleaves. He uses maple syrup, not cornsyrup, which gives him a quarter of thesugar of Heinz. He pours his ketchupinto a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sellsit for three times the price of Heinz,and for the past few years he has criss-crossed the country, peddling World’s

Best in six flavors—regular, sweet, dill,garlic, caramelized onion, and basil—tospecialty grocery stores and supermar-kets. If you were in Zabar’s on Man-hattan’s Upper West Side a few monthsago, you would have seen him at thefront of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He waswearing 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 miniaturechicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so openjars of his ketchup. “Try my ketchup!”Wigon said, over and over, to anyonewho passed. “If you don’t try it, you’redoomed to eat Heinz the rest of yourlife.”

In the same aisle at Zabar’s that daytwo other demonstrations were goingon, so that people were starting at oneend with free chicken sausage, samplinga slice of prosciutto, and then pausingat the World’s Best stand before head-ing for the cash register. They wouldlook down at the array of open jars, andWigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one of his ketch-ups, and hand it to them with a flourish.The ratio of tomato solids to liquid inWorld’s Best is much higher than inHeinz, and the maple syrup gives it anunmistakable sweet kick. Invariably,people would close their eyes, just for amoment, and do a subtle double take.Some of them would look slightlyperplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick up a jar. “You knowwhy you like it so much?” he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most im-pressed. “Because you’ve been eatingbad ketchup all your life!” Jim Wigonhad a simple vision: build a betterketchup—the way Grey Poupon built abetter mustard—and the world willbeat a path to your door. If only it werethat easy.

The story of World’s Best Ketchupcannot properly be told without

a man from White Plains, New York,named Howard Moskowitz. Mos-kowitz is sixty, short and round, withgraying hair and huge gold-rimmedglasses. When he talks, he favors theSocratic monologue—a series of ques-tions that he poses to himself, then

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answers, punctuated by “ahhh” andmuch vigorous nodding. He is a linealdescendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as theSeer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. AtHarvard, he wrote his doctoral disser-tation on psychophysics, and all therooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research businessare named after famous psychophysi-cists. (“Have you ever heard ofthe name Rose Marie Pang-born? Ahhh. She was a pro-fessor at Davis. Very famous.This is the Pangborn kitchen.”)Moskowitz is a man of un-common exuberance and per-suasiveness: if he had been yourfreshman statistics professor,you would today be a statisti-cian. “My favorite writer? Gibbon,” heburst out, when we met not long ago.He had just been holding forth on thesubject of sodium solutions.“Right nowI’m working my way through the Haleshistory of the Byzantine Empire. Holyshit! Everything is easy until you get tothe Byzantine Empire. It’s impossible.One emperor is always killing the oth-ers, and everyone has five wives or threehusbands. It’s very Byzantine.”

Moskowitz set up shop in the sev-enties, and one of his first clients wasPepsi. The artificial sweetener aspar-tame had just become available, andPepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure outthe perfect amount of sweetener for acan of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that any-thing below eight per cent sweetnesswas not sweet enough and anythingover twelve per cent was too sweet. SoMoskowitz did the logical thing. Hemade up experimental batches of DietPepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness—8 per cent, 8.25 per cent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12—gavethem to hundreds of people, and lookedfor the concentration that people likedthe most. But the data were a mess—there wasn’t a pattern—and one day,sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realizedwhy. They had been asking the wrongquestion. There was no such thing asthe perfect Diet Pepsi. They shouldhave been looking for the perfect DietPepsis.

It took a long time for the foodworld to catch up with Howard Mos-kowitz. He knocked on doors and tried

to explain his idea about the pluralnature of perfection, and no one an-swered. He spoke at food-industry con-ferences, and audiences shrugged. Buthe could think of nothing else. “It’s like that Yiddish expression,” he says.“Do you know it? To a worm in horse-radish, the world is horseradish!”Then,in 1986, he got a call from the Camp-bell’s Soup Company. They were in the

spaghetti-sauce business, goingup against Ragú with theirPrego brand. Prego was a littlethicker than Ragú, with dicedtomatoes as opposed to Ragú’spurée, and, Campbell’s thought,had better pasta adherence.But, for all that, Prego was in aslump, and Campbell’s was des-perate for new ideas.

Standard practice in the food indus-try would have been to convene a focusgroup and ask spaghetti eaters whatthey wanted. But Moskowitz does notbelieve that consumers—even spaghettilovers—know what they desire if whatthey desire does not yet exist. “Themind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying,“knows not what the tongue wants.”Instead, working with the Campbell’skitchens, he came up with forty-fivevarieties of spaghetti sauce.These weredesigned to differ in every conceivableway: spiciness, sweetness, tartness,saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel,cost of ingredients, and so forth. Hehad a trained panel of food tasters ana-lyze each of those varieties in depth.Then he took the prototypes on theroad—to New York, Chicago, Los An-geles, and Jacksonville—and asked peo-ple in groups of twenty-five to eat be-tween eight and ten small bowls ofdifferent spaghetti sauces over twohours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz chartedthe 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 peo-ple’s preferences fell into one of threebroad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last wasthe most important. Why? Because atthe time there was no extra-chunkyspaghetti sauce in the supermarket.Over the next decade, that new cate-

gory proved to be worth hundreds ofmillions of dollars to Prego. “We allsaid, ‘Wow!’ ” Monica Wood, who wasthen the head of market research forCampbell’s, recalls. “Here there was thisthird segment—people who liked theirspaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it—and it was completely untapped. So inabout 1989-90 we launched Pregoextra-chunky. It was extraordinarilysuccessful.”

It may be hard today, fifteen yearslater—when every brand seems to comein multiple varieties—to appreciate howmuch of a breakthrough this was. Inthose years, people in the food industrycarried around in their heads the notionof a platonic dish—the version of a dishthat looked and tasted absolutely right.At Ragú and Prego, they had been striv-ing for the platonic spaghetti sauce, andthe platonic spaghetti sauce was thinand blended because that’s the way theythought it was done in Italy. Cooking,on the industrial level, was consumedwith the search for human universals.Once you start looking for the sources ofhuman variability, though, the old or-thodoxy goes out the window. HowardMoskowitz stood up to the Platonistsand said there are no universals.

Moskowitz still has a version of thecomputer model he used for Prego fif-teen years ago. It has all the coded resultsfrom the consumer taste tests and theexpert tastings, split into the three cate-gories (plain, spicy, and extra-chunky)and linked up with the actual ingredientslist on a spreadsheet. “You know howthey have a computer model for build-ing an aircraft,” Moskowitz said as he pulled up the program on his com-puter. “This is a model for buildingspaghetti sauce. Look, every variable ishere.” He pointed at column after col-umn of ratings. “So here are the ingredi-ents. I’m a brand manager for Prego.I want to optimize one of the seg-ments. Let’s start with Segment 1.”In Moskowitz’s program, the threespaghetti-sauce groups were labelledSegment 1, Segment 2, and Segment 3. He typed in a few commands, in-structing the computer to give him the formulation that would score thehighest with those people in Segment 1. The answer appeared almost im-mediately: a specific recipe that, accord-ing to Moskowitz’s data, produced a

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score of 78 from the people in Seg-ment 1. But that same formulation didn’tdo nearly as well with those in Seg-ment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it67 and 57,respectively.Moskowitz startedagain, this time asking the computer tooptimize for Segment 2. This time theratings came in at 82, but now Segment1 had fallen ten points, to 68. “See whathappens?” he said. “If I make one grouphappier, I piss off another group. Wedid this for coffee with General Foods,and we found that if you create only oneproduct the best you can get across allthe segments is a 60—if you’re lucky.That’s if you were to treat everybody asone big happy family. But if I do thesensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71,72. Is that big? Ahhh. It’s a very big dif-ference. In coffee, a 71 is something you’lldie for.”

When Jim Wigon set up shop thatday in Zabar’s, then, his operating as-sumption was that there ought to besome segment of the population thatpreferred a ketchup made with Stanis-

laus tomato paste and hand-choppedbasil and maple syrup. That’s the Mos-kowitz theory. But there is theory andthere is practice. By the end of that long day, Wigon had sold ninety jars.But he’d also got two parking ticketsand had to pay for a hotel room, so hewasn’t going home with money in hispocket. For the year, Wigon estimates,he’ll sell fifty thousand jars—which, inthe universe of condiments, is no morethan a blip. “I haven’t drawn a paycheckin five years,” Wigon said as he impaledanother meatball on a toothpick. “Mywife is killing me.” And it isn’t justWorld’s Best that is struggling. In thegourmet-ketchup world, there is RiverRun and Uncle Dave’s, from Vermont,and Muir Glen Organic and Mrs.TomatoHead Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Cat-sup, in California, and dozens of oth-ers—and every year Heinz’s overwhelm-ing share of the ketchup market justgrows.

It is possible, of course, that ketchupis waiting for its own version of that

Rolls-Royce commercial, or the dis-covery of the ketchup equivalent ofextra-chunky—the magic formula thatwill satisfy an unmet need. It is alsopossible, however, that the rules ofHoward Moskowitz, which apply toGrey Poupon and Prego spaghetti sauceand to olive oil and salad dressing andvirtually everything else in the super-market, don’t apply to ketchup.

Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation—the union of the

English tradition of fruit and vegetablesauces and the growing American in-fatuation with the tomato. But what weknow today as ketchup emerged out ofa debate that raged in the first years ofthe last century over benzoate, a preser-vative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey Washing-ton Wiley, the chief of the Bureau ofChemistry in the Department of Agri-culture from 1883 to 1912, came to be-lieve that benzoates were not safe, andthe result was an argument that split the

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ketchup world in half. On one side wasthe ketchup establishment, which be-lieved that it was impossible to makeketchup without benzoate and thatbenzoate was not harmful in the amountsused. On the other side was a renegadeband of ketchup manufacturers, whobelieved that the preservative puzzle couldbe solved with the application of culi-nary science.The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery,in part because they were made fromunripe tomatoes, which are low in thecomplex carbohydrates known as pec-tin, which add body to a sauce. But whatif you made ketchup from ripe toma-toes, giving it the density it needed toresist degradation? Nineteenth-centuryketchups had a strong tomato taste, withjust a light vinegar touch. The rene-gades argued that by greatly increasingthe amount of vinegar, in effect pro-tecting the tomatoes by pickling them,they were making a superior ketchup:safer, purer, and better tasting. They of-fered a money-back guarantee in theevent of spoilage. They charged morefor their product, convinced that thepublic would pay more for a betterketchup, and they were right. The ben-zoate ketchups disappeared. The leaderof the renegade band was an entrepre-neur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J.Heinz.

The world’s leading expert on ketch-up’s early years is Andrew F. Smith,a substantial man, well over six feet,with a graying mustache and shortwavy black hair. Smith is a scholar,trained as a political scientist, intent onbringing rigor to the world of food.When we met for lunch not long ago at the restaurant Savoy in SoHo(chosen because of the excel-lence of its hamburger and Frenchfries, and because Savoy makesits own ketchup—a dark, pep-pery, and viscous variety servedin a white porcelain saucer),Smith was in the throes of examiningthe origins of the croissant for the up-coming “Oxford Encyclopedia of Foodand Drink in America,” of which he isthe editor-in-chief. Was the croissantinvented in 1683, by the Viennese, incelebration of their defeat of the in-vading Turks? Or in 1686, by the resi-dents of Budapest, to celebrate their de-feat of the Turks? Both explanations

Old Guard,he was the one who changedthe flavor of ketchup in a way that madeit universal.

There are five known fundamentaltastes in the human palate: salty,

sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umamiis the proteiny, full-bodied taste ofchicken soup, or cured meat, or fishstock, or aged cheese, or mother’s milk,or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or sea-weed, or cooked tomato. “Umami addsbody,” Gary Beauchamp, who headsthe Monell Chemical Senses Center,in Philadelphia, says. “If you add it to asoup, it makes the soup seem like it’sthicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turnsa soup from salt water into a food.”When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoesand increased the percentage of tomatosolids, he made ketchup, first and fore-most, a potent source of umami. Thenhe dramatically increased the concen-tration of vinegar, so that his ketchuphad twice the acidity of most otherketchups; now ketchup was sour, an-other of the fundamental tastes. Thepost-benzoate ketchups also doubledthe concentration of sugar—so nowketchup was also sweet—and all alongketchup had been salty and bitter.These are not trivial issues. Give a babysoup, and then soup with MSG (anamino-acid salt that is pure umami),and the baby will go back for the MSGsoup every time, the same way a babywill always prefer water with sugar towater alone. Salt and sugar and umamiare primal signals about the food weare eating—about how dense it is incalories, for example, or, in the case ofumami, about the presence of proteinsand amino acids.What Heinz had donewas come up with a condiment thatpushed all five of these primal buttons.The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began atthe tip of the tongue, where our recep-tors for sweet and salty first appear,moved along the sides, where sour notesseem the strongest, then hit the back ofthe tongue, for umami and bitter, inone long crescendo. How many thingsin the supermarket run the sensoryspectrum like this?

A number of years ago, the H. J.Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researcherswent into people’s homes and watchedthe way they used ketchup. “I remem-

would explain its distinctive crescentshape—since it would make a certaincultural sense (particularly for the Vi-ennese) to consecrate their battlefieldtriumphs in the form of pastry. But theonly reference Smith could find to ei-ther story was in the Larousse Gas-tronomique of 1938. “It just doesn’tcheck out,” he said, shaking his headwearily.

Smith’s specialty is the tomato, how-ever, and over the course of many schol-arly articles and books—“The Hist-ory of Home-Made Anglo-AmericanTomato Ketchup,” for Petits Propos Culi-naires, for example, and “The GreatTomato Pill War of the 1830’s,” for TheConnecticut Historical Society Bulletin—Smith has argued that some critical por-tion of the history of culinary civiliza-tion could be told through this fruit.Cortez brought tomatoes to Europefrom the New World, and they inex-orably insinuated themselves into theworld’s cuisines.The Italians substitutedthe tomato for eggplant. In northernIndia, it went into curries and chutneys.“The biggest tomato producer in theworld today?” Smith paused, for dra-matic effect. “China. You don’t think oftomato being a part of Chinese cuisine,and it wasn’t ten years ago. But it is now.”Smith dipped one of my French friesinto the homemade sauce. “It has thatraw taste,” he said, with a look of intenseconcentration.“It’s fresh ketchup.You cantaste the tomato.” Ketchup was, to hismind, the most nearly perfect of all thetomato’s manifestations. It was inexpen-sive, which meant that it had a firm lockon the mass market, and it was a condi-ment, not an ingredient, which meant

that it could be applied at thediscretion of the food eater, notthe food preparer. “There’s aquote from Elizabeth Rozin I’vealways loved,” he said. Rozin isthe food theorist who wrote theessay “Ketchup and the Col-

lective Unconscious,” and Smith usedher conclusion as the epigraph of hisketchup book: ketchup may well be “theonly true culinary expression of themelting pot, and . . . its special and un-precedented ability to provide some-thing for everyone makes it the Es-peranto of cuisine.”Here is where HenryHeinz and the benzoate battle were soimportant: in defeating the condiment

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ber sitting in one of those households,”Casey Keller, who was until recentlythe chief growth officer for Heinz, says.“There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was thatthe kids asked for ketchup and Mombrought it out. It was a forty-ounce bot-tle. And the three-year-old went tograb it himself, and Mom interceptedthe bottle and said, ‘No, you’re notgoing to do that.’ She physically tookthe bottle away and doled out a littledollop. You could see that the wholething was a bummer.” For Heinz, Kellersays, that moment was an epiphany. Atypical five-year-old consumes aboutsixty per cent more ketchup than a typ-ical forty-year-old, and the companyrealized 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 whathe eats for dinner, in most cases,” Kel-ler says. “But the one thing he can con-trol is ketchup. It’s the one part of thefood experience that he can customizeand personalize.” As a result, Heinzcame out with the so-called EZ Squirtbottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where theEZ Squirt is used, ketchup consump-

tion has grown by as much as twelve per cent.

There is another lesson in that house-hold scene, though. Small children tendto be neophobic: once they hit two orthree, they shrink from new tastes.Thatmakes sense, evolutionarily, becausethrough much of human history that isthe age at which children would havefirst begun to gather and forage forthemselves, and those who strayed fromwhat was known and trusted wouldnever have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with some-thing strange on his plate—tuna fish,perhaps, or Brussels sprouts—and hewanted to alter his food in some waythat made the unfamiliar familiar. Hewanted to subdue the contents of hisplate. And so he turned to ketchup, be-cause, alone among the condiments onthe table, ketchup could deliver sweetand sour and salty and bitter and umami,all at once.

Last February, Edgar Chambers IV,who runs the sensory-analysis cen-

ter at Kansas State University, con-ducted a joint assessment of World’sBest and Heinz. He has seventeentrained tasters on his staff, and they

work for academia and industry, an-swering the often difficult question ofwhat a given substance tastes like. It isdemanding work. Immediately afterconducting the ketchup study, Cham-bers dispatched a team to Bangkok todo an analysis of fruit—bananas, man-goes, rose apples, and sweet tamarind.Others were detailed to soy and kimchiin South Korea, and Chambers’s wifeled a delegation to Italy to analyze icecream.

The ketchup tasting took place overfour hours, on two consecutive morn-ings. Six tasters sat around a large, roundtable with a lazy Susan in the middle.In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups,one filled with Heinz ketchupand one filled with World’s Best. Theywould work along fourteen dimen-sions of flavor and texture, in accordancewith the standard fifteen-point scaleused by the food world.The flavor com-ponents would be divided two ways: el-ements picked up by the tongue and el-ements picked up by the nose. A veryripe peach, for example, tastes sweet butit also smells sweet—which is a very different aspect of sweetness. Vinegarhas a sour taste but also a pungency, avapor that rises up the back of the noseand fills the mouth when you breatheout. To aid in the rating process, thetasters surrounded themselves with lit-tle bowls of sweet and sour and salty solutions, and portions of Contadinatomato paste, Hunt’s tomato sauce, andCampbell’s tomato juice, all of whichrepresent different concentrations oftomato-ness.

After breaking the ketchup downinto its component parts, the testers as-sessed the critical dimension of “ampli-tude,” the word sensory experts use todescribe flavors that are well blendedand balanced, that “bloom” in the mouth.“The difference between high and lowamplitude is the difference between myson and a great pianist playing ‘Ode toJoy’ on the piano,” Chambers says.“They are playing the same notes, butthey blend better with the great pia-nist.” Pepperidge Farm shortbreadcookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman’s mayon-naise and Sara Lee poundcake. Whensomething is high in amplitude, all itsconstituent elements converge into asingle gestalt. You can’t isolate the ele-

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“The machine’s done something really weird to Mr. Hendrickson.”

ments of an iconic, high-amplitude fla-vor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But youcan with one of those private-labelcolas that you get in the supermarket.“The thing about Coke and Pepsi isthat they are absolutely gorgeous,” JudyHeylmun, a vice-president of SensorySpectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jer-sey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hardto do that well. Usually, when you tastea store cola it’s”— and here she made aseries of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all thenotes are kind of spiky, and usually thecitrus is the first thing to spike out. Andthen the cinnamon. Citrus and brownspice notes are top notes and very vola-tile, as opposed to vanilla, which is verydark and deep. A really cheap storebrand will have a big, fat cinnamonnote sitting on top of everything.”

Some of the cheaper ketchups are the same way. Ketchup aficionados saythat there’s a disquieting unevenness to the tomato notes in Del Monteketchup: Tomatoes vary, in acidity andsweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid,according to the seed variety used, thetime of year they are harvested, the soil inwhich they are grown, and the weatherduring the growing season. Unless allthose variables are tightly controlled, onebatch of ketchup can end up too wateryand another can be too strong.Or try oneof the numerous private-label brands thatmake up the bottom of the ketchup mar-ket and pay attention to the spice mix;youmay well find yourself conscious of theclove note or overwhelmed by a hit ofgarlic. Generic colas and ketchups havewhat Moskowitz calls a hook—a sensoryattribute that you can single out, and ulti-mately tire of.

The tasting began with a plasticspoon. Upon consideration, it was de-cided that the analysis would be helpedif the ketchups were tasted on Frenchfries, so a batch of fries were cooked up,and distributed around the table. Eachtester, according to protocol, took thefries one by one, dipped them into thecup—all the way, right to the bottom—bit off the portion covered in ketchup,and then contemplated the evidence oftheir senses. For Heinz, the critical fla-vor components—vinegar, salt, tomatoI.D. (over-all tomato-ness), sweet, andbitter—were judged to be present inroughly equal concentrations, and those

elements, in turn, were judged to bewell blended. The World’s Best, though,“had a completely different view, a dif-ferent profile, from the Heinz,” Cham-bers said. It had a much stronger hit ofsweet aromatics—4.0 to 2.5—and out-stripped Heinz on tomato I.D. by a re-sounding 9 to 5.5. But there was lesssalt, and no discernible vinegar. “Theother comment from the panel was thatthese elements were really not blendedat all,” Chambers went on.“The World’sBest product had really low amplitude.”According to Joyce Buchholz, one ofthe panelists, when the group judgedaftertaste, “it seemed like a certain fla-vor would hang over longer in the case ofWorld’s Best—that cooked-tomatoeyflavor.”

But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, like sub-stituting maple syrup for corn syrup,ramping up the tomato solids. Thatmade for an unusual and daring flavor.World’s Best Dill ketchup on fried cat-fish, for instance, is a marvellous thing.But it also meant that his ketchupwasn’t as sensorily complete as Heinz,and he was paying a heavy price in am-plitude. “Our conclusion was mainlythis,” Buchholz said. “We felt thatWorld’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 anoptimal spaghetti sauce for every man,woman,and child in America.Measuredagainst the monotony that confrontedHoward Moskowitz twenty years ago,this is progress. Happiness, in one sense,is a function of how closely our worldconforms to the infinite variety of hu-man preference. But that makes it easyto forget that sometimes happiness canbe found in having what we’ve alwayshad and everyone else is having. “Backin the seventies, someone else—I thinkit was Ragú—tried to do an ‘Italian’-style ketchup,” Moskowitz said. “Theyfailed miserably.” It was a conundrum:what was true about a yellow condi-ment that went on hot dogs was nottrue about a tomato condiment thatwent on hamburgers, and what was trueabout tomato sauce when you addedvisible solids and put it in a jar wassomehow not true about tomato saucewhen you added vinegar and sugar andput it in a bottle. Moskowitz shrugged. “Iguess ketchup is ketchup.” ♦

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“Love the tie, Chad—that is so pimp!”

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