What the Dog Saw [15]
So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enameled 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). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals — which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There’s a man in the backseat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the reveal. The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. “Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?”
In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped 40 to 50 percent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by 40 to 50 percent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. By the end of the 1980s Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. “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.”
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. 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. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. 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. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.
Wigon is from Boston. He’s a thickset man in his fifties, with a full salt-and-pepper beard. 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. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand, because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He uses maple syrup, not corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. 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. 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