Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss Page A

consumer excitement to the main product; he imagined reworking the main products themselves, with the idea that consumers could be sorted into groups with distinct preferences. With that insight, Moskowitz’s shop turned into the industry’s miracle maker as food companies ditched their own in-house food technicians to retain his advice. Vlasic, the pickle maker, hired Moskowitz and came away with the finding that pickle lovers fell into three large groups whose preference for tartness ranged from weak to strong. Campbell, the soup manufacturer, brought him aboard to revamp its Prego spaghetti sauce, which was getting trounced by Ragu.
    The brilliance of his work on Prego was memorialized in a 2004 presentation by the author Malcolm Gladwell at the TED Conference in Monterey, California, in which Gladwell called Moskowitz a “personal hero”:
    After … months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce.… Did he look for the most popular brand, variety of spaghetti sauce? No,… instead he looked at the data and he said, “Let’s see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas.” And sure enough, if you sitdown and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. 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 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. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, “Are 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 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. And over the next ten years, they made $600 million off their line of extra chunky sauces. And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, “Oh my god, we’ve been thinking all wrong.” And that’s when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar and fourteen different kinds of mustard and seventy-one different kinds of olive oil.
    And then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, … and today [with Ragu] there are thirty-six in six varieties. Cheese. Light. Robusto. Rich and Hearty. Old World Traditional. Extra Chunky Garden. That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.… He fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.
    Well, yes, and no. One thing Gladwell didn’t mention is that the food industry already knew some things about making people happy—namely, sugar. The Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as three Oreo cookies, a tube of Go-Gurt, or some of the Pepperidge Farm Apple Turnovers that Campbell also makes. It also deliversone-third of the salt recommended for a majority of American adults for an entire day. Some of the meat versions of Prego have even higher amounts of sugar and salt, along with nearly half a day’s recommended limit for saturated fat. In making these sauces, Campbell supplied the ingredients, including the salt, sugar, and fat, while Moskowitz supplied the optimization technique and his deep knowledge of sugar. “More is not necessarily better,” Moskowitz wrote in his own account of the Prego project. “As the sensory intensity (say, of sweetness) increases, consumers first say that they like the product more, but