Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce.

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce

I talked about spaghetti sauce.

There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country.

But as soon as you walk in, I go, Ooh. Spaghetti sauce there.

Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one.

Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No!

And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me.

And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say, What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.

And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey ness, by visible solids my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business.

And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early '80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the '70s and '80s.

And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups.

Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce.

And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs? And he said yes!

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce.

People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years.

David Cameron s European Spaghetti Bowl

Tom knows how to cook spaghetti.

Tom knows how to cook spaghetti.

Hunger is the best sauce.

Hunger is the best sauce.

His shirt was stained with sauce.

Kids love pasta in tomato sauce.

So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

The culture of tomato sauce was thin.

I'd like the sauce on the side.

Mix the rice, egg and soy sauce.

Mix the rice, egg and soy sauce.

And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens.

Mix the rice and eggs with soy sauce.

And we had to create kind of a sauce.

Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended it's thin.

When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus, which had no visible solids, right?

Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane.

There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku.

The herb used in that pasta sauce might be parsley.

You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right?

Girls' brains are like spaghetti everything in their life is connected to everything else.

It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti.

People swore they were eating barbecue sauce, and this is free food.

They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was.

One kilogram of tomato sauce is equivalent to two kilograms of tomatoes.