"Spaghetti sauces" or "How Howard Moskowitz changed the food industry"

I’ve just had a look at the TED homepage Mr. Newman talked about in his blog. And while I was browsing the various themes, one special talk captured my attention- a man talking about spaghetti sauces. Considering that spaghetti are my main source of nourishment I HAD to listen to this talk named “What we can learn from spaghetti sauce”.

Malcolm Gladwell, a man with a haircut similar to Einstein’s, is a writer, who has published two best-sellers and also writes for the “New Yorker”. In this 17 minutes long monologue he talks about Howard Moskowitz, a psycho-physicist, who revolutionized food industry.

Howard Moskowitz was the first one to realize that it’s not enough to produce food in one style. There have to be many flavours of one product to please all American people. Gladwell tells how Moskowitz came to this idea, about his struggle to spread it and about his success. Gladwell says, not only did Moskowitz enriched the market with many sorts of product variations, but he also taught us three very important lessons:

• Firstly, Moskowitz claims that the consumers don’t exactly know what they want.



• Secondly, he tried to show that products aren’t better just because they are more expensive or mainstream products. People should choose the products that suit them, no matter how cheap or unpopular they are.



• And lastly, he made the food industry realize that they have to try to please the individual people and not only the majority.

Gladwell seems to be deeply impressed by Moskowitz’ doings and by the way he managed to make people happier with industrial food. In my opinion, this topic is a little too trivial to name it an "idea worth spreading", however, I loved listening to Gladwell. He obviously has excellent rhetorical skills and, in addition, is funny, too.

Have fun checking out the site!