“If you don’t try it, you’re doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life.” “Try my ketchup!” Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed.
In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. He was wearing a World’s Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. If you were in Zabar’s on Manhattan’s Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He pours his ketchup into a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sells it for three times the price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has crisscrossed the country, peddling World’s Best in six flavors-regular, sweet, dill, garlic, caramelized onion, and basil-to specialty grocery stores and supermarkets. He uses maple syrup, not corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. Basil is chopped by hand, because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. He runs his ketchup business-under the brand World’s Best Ketchup-out of the catering business of his partner, Nick Schiarizzi, in Norwood, Massachusetts, just off Route 1, in a low-slung building behind an industrial-equipment-rental shop.
#BITTER TWO FARM STANDS DIVIDES FULL#
He’s a thickset man in his early fifties, with a full salt-and-pepper beard. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup. Isn’t the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt’s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands.
And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn’t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more-in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces-as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. “The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life’s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, “and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people’s minds that this was something truly different and superior.” By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by forty to fifty per cent again. Then comes what is known in the business as the “reveal.” The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. There’s a man in the back seat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television.
They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals-which was a brand-new idea at the time. The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). In the food world that almost never happens even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French’s or the runner-up, Gulden’s. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French’s. Ketchup triggers, in equal measure, all five of the fundamental tastes one food theorist calls it "the Esperanto of cuisine." Ruven Afanador
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