The Plurality of Perfection

Photo by Heather Ford on Unsplash

Years ago, Macolm Gladwell gave a Ted Talk raving the work of Howard Moskowitz. Howard is a psychophysicist - someone who studies perception and how it relates to physical stimuli. Howard's specialty was taste and smell and it was his work with Campbell Soup's Spaghetti sauces which made him famous enough to be the sole focus of Gladwell's Ted Talk.

For those of you who were around in the '70s and early '80s, you may recall that Ragu was the dominant tomato sauce on the shelves of the grocery stores. Prego, made by Cambell Soup, was struggling to keep up and so they hired Howard Moskowitz to see if they could determine the recipe for the best spaghetti sauce. He went on to make 45 varieties of sauce which were then tested with focus groups across the United States. He gave participants 10 bowls of pasta, each with a different sauce, and asked them to rate each sauce from zero to 100.

After months of testing, Moskowitz analyzed the data and made a startling discovery: there is no such thing as the perfect tomato sauce.

Rather than finding one sauce that stood out more than the other, Moskowitz realized that all the data points fell into three different clusters: people who liked plain sauce, people who liked spicy sauce, and people who liked extra chunky. What was significant for Prego, was that at the time, chunky tomato sauce could not be found anywhere in stores and so the third of the population which preferred chunky tomato sauce was not being served. This meant that if Prego developed a chunky sauce, they would immediately be top of the market.

Over the next 10 years, Campbell would not only make $600 million off their line of extra chunky tomato sauce, but they would become the model for customizing products. When we walk through the supermarket in 2025, we see dozens of types of olive oils, mustards, salad dressings… so many different types of perfect for different types of people.

When interviewed about the Ted Talk, Howard Moscowitz described his contribution as saying that he helped people recognize there is no perfect product, but rather a plurality of perfection.

"I've helped people get what they want by recognizing that there's no perfect product. I helped identify the fact that there's a plurality of perfection, and that what you like is not necessarily what I like." - Howard Moscowitz

As Gladwell put it, "there is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people."

There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people.

My favorite part of this story is that in all the studies, not a single person said, "I want chunky tomato sauce." Why not? Because most of the time people don't know what they want, and even when they do, they can rarely articulate it. This was something new that they discovered during their testing and it went against the line of thinking that previously existed in the food industry. Before the Prego study, it was assumed that the best way to find out what makes people happy, is to ask them. But the Prego study revealed that people don't always know what they want, therefore they need to be given the opportunity to try it and say I like this one.

As you start your week this week, I hope you'll embrace the plurality of perfection that exists in your life and take some time to find your version of perfect.

Listen to the full Ted Talk Here: TED Radio Hour: Malcolm Gladwell: What Does Spaghetti Sauce Have To Do With Happiness? : NPR