Food This article is more than 19 years old

The sauce apprentice

This article is more than 19 years oldEntrepreneur Jim Wigon was sure he could make a tomato ketchup to rival Heinz. But, says Malcolm Gladwell, he was up against a work of genius

Jim Wigon runs his ketchup business under the brand World's Best Ketchup out of Norwood, Massachusetts, in a low-slung building behind an industrial equipment rental shop. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic and a high-quality 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 10oz jar, and sells it for three times the price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has criss-crossed theUS, peddling World's Best in six flavours - regular, sweet, dill, garlic, caramelised onion and basil - to speciality grocery stores and supermarkets. "Try my ketchup!" Wigon says. If you don't try it, "you're doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life".

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 close their eyes for a moment, and do a subtle double take. Some of them look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others nod and pick up a jar. "You know why you like it so much?" he says, in his broad Boston accent. "Because you've been eating bad ketchup all your life!" Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchup and the world will beat a path to your door. If only it were that easy.

The story of World's Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz set up his food-testing business in the 70s, 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 for a can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below 8% sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over 12% was too sweet. So Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches with every conceivable degree of sweetness - 8%, 8.25%, 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 was a mess. There was no pattern and one day Moskowitz realised 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 Moskowitz. He spoke at industry conferences and audiences shrugged. Then, in 1986, he got a call from the Campbell's Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti sauce business, up against Ragú, and were desperate for new ideas.

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghettieaters 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. Instead, he came up with 45 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. Then he took the prototypes on the road, and asked people to eat between eight and 10 small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to 100.

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.

"We said, 'Wow!'" recalls Monica Wood, who was then head of market research for Campbell's. "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."

When Wigon set up shop, then, his operating assumption was that there ought to be some segment of the population that preferred a ketchup made with Stanislaus tomato paste, hand-chopped basil and maple syrup. That's the Moskowitz theory. But there is theory and there is practice. For the year, Wigon estimates, he'll sell 50,000 jars, which, in the universe of condiments, is no more than a blip. "I haven't drawn a pay cheque in five years," Wigon says. "My wife is killing me."

It isn't just World's Best that is struggling. In the gourmet ketchup world, there is River Run and Uncle Dave's, and Muir Glen Organic and Mrs Tomato Head Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Catsup, and dozens of others - and every year Heinz's overwhelming share of the market grows. It is possible, of course, that ketchup is waiting for its own equivalent of extra-chunky - the magic formula that will satisfy an unmet need. It is also possible, however, that the rules of Moskowitz, which apply to virtually everything else in the supermarket, don't apply to ketchup.

Tomato ketchup is a 19th-century creation, the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. The 19thcentury ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes - these are low in pectin, which adds body. They had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. Some 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 charged more, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right. The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur from Pittsburgh named Henry JHeinz.

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, soy sauce, mushrooms or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," says Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia. "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 his ketchup had twice the acidity of most others; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. He 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. 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 products run the sensory spectrum like this?

Last year, Edgar Chambers, who runs the sensory analysis centre at Kansas State University, conducted a joint assessment of World's Best and Heinz. The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings. Six tasters sat around a large table. In front of each were two 1oz cups, one filled with Heinz and one filled with World's Best. The flavour components would be divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by the nose. (Vinegar, for example, has a sour taste, but also pungency, a vapour 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 tomato paste, tomato sauce and 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 flavours 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."

You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavour such as 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," says Judy Heylmun, vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, in Chatham, New Jersey. "They have beautiful notes; all flavours are in balance. It's very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola, all the notes are kind of spiky and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. 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. Tomatoes vary in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid, according to the seed variety used, the year they are harvested, the soil in which they are grown, and the weather. Unless all those variables are tightly controlled, one batch of ketchup can end up too watery and another can be too strong. Try one of the brands that make up the bottom of the 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.

It was decided that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French fries. Each tester 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 flavour components - vinegar, salt, overall 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.

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 and outstripped Heinz on tomato-ness. 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, "a certain flavour would hang over longer in the case of World's Best - that cooked-tomatoey flavour."

But what was Wigon to do? To compete with Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, such as substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, and ramping up the tomato solids. That made for an unusual and daring flavour. World's Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvellous thing. But it also meant his ketchup wasn't as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price. 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 36 varieties of Ragú spaghetti sauce, under six rubrics (old world style, chunky garden style, robusto, light, cheese creations, and rich & meaty), which means there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman, and child in America. Measured against the monotony that confronted Moskowitz 20 years ago, this is progress.

But it is easy to forget that sometimes happiness is having what we've always had and everyone else is having. "Back in the 70s, someone else - I think it was Ragú - tried to do an 'Italian style' ketchup," says Moskowitz. "They failed miserably." 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 shrugs. "I guess ketchup is ketchup." © Malcolm Gladwell Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchup and the world will beat a path to your door World's Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish is a marvellous thing, but not as sensorily complete as Heinz

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