Can a sauce be a symphony? The author Malcolm Gladwell suggests it can. Well then, does that make Henry J Heinz the Mozart of umami?
Writing in The New Yorker, Gladwell, best known for his bestseller The Tipping Point, claimed no competitor could beat Heinz ketchup because it appealed to all “five fundamental tastes.” In other words, Heinz’s celebrated condiment played all the right gastronomic notes, in exactly the right order.
The journalist, sounding more music critic than food scientist, went on, “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.”
Of those five tastes, Gladwell scored umami as the most important: “Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged[CR1.1] cheese, or mother’s milk,” he says.
So, more moreish = more umami. More umami = more moreish-ness. From a food manufacturer’s point of view, a perfectly virtuous circle.
Launched in 1876, Heinz then refined his recipe around ripe tomatoes and a higher concentration of tomato solids, making his ketchup a potent source of umami. After that eureka moment, sales of the sauce quickly suggested he was on to something.
Gladwell argues Heinz ketchup succeeds because it combines all five basic tastes and achieves unusual sensory balance or “amplitude” – how smoothly blended and balanced the whole flavour feels in your mouth.
The British-born writer and podcaster is highly skilled in translating ideas from psychology, sociology, and behavioural science into accessible narratives. And his essay, The Ketchup Conundrum, contains a broader point for the food industry as a whole. Essentially, it’s a lesson in category leadership.
Heinz won, Gladwell implies, because he solved the product problem at a deeper level than his competitors. The ketchup’s unique blend of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami tastes less like one option amongst the crowd and more like the finished definition of ketchup – how tomato sauce was always supposed to be. And so, it quickly became the yardstick by which every other tomato sauce came to be measured. By creating a definitive product, Heinz had defined the entire category.
Can a sauce be a symphony? If scored by Henry J Heinz, it seems the answer is ‘yes.’