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 Prego's "Sauce of the year" | |
| Product type | Pasta sauce |
|---|---|
| Owner | Campbell Soup Company |
| Country | U.S. |
| Introduced | 1981 |
| Markets | Worldwide |
| Website | campbells.com/prego |
Prego (Italian for "You're welcome!") is a trade mark brand name pasta sauce of Campbell Soup Company. It was introduced internationally in 1981. [1]
Prego offers many different varieties. The traditional pasta sauce is available in nineteen different flavors including marinara, traditional, mini meatball, zesty mushroom, and roasted garlic Parmesan. In Prego's Organic line, two flavors (Organic Mushroom and Organic Tomato and Basil) are made with all organic ingredients. A third line in the Prego Pasta Sauce family is called Hearty Meat sauce. It comes in Meatball Parmesan, Authentic Italian Sausage, and Three Meat Supreme flavours. Yet another line is called Chunky Garden Pasta Sauce which consists of flavors such as Garden Combination, Mushroom Supreme, Mushrooms & Green Pepper, and Tomato, Onion & Garlic. In Asia, specific regional flavors are available, including Tom Yam in Thailand and Malaysia.
Prego was the result of efforts in the 1970s by Campbell's Soup to expand its work with tomatoes beyond the soup business. Although senior management originally wanted to create a product to directly attack Heinz (which had sued Campbell's Soup over unfair business practices) the company had no competitive advantage producing ketchup. On the other hand, Campbell's R&D group and Chef Werner Schilling developed a process to allow thick tomato sauce to be mass-produced without "weeping" (separation of water from the solids). The other major companies in the pasta sauce market, Ragu and Hunt's, used starch to achieve thickness, which limited the appeal of store bought sauce for families who wanted a sauce comparable to home made. As a result of the anti-weeping innovation and smart marketing, Prego became one of the most successful grocery product launches of the early 1980s. In 2017, William M. Hildebolt, the R&D lead on Prego's development who went on to become VP of Research and Development at Campbell's, [2] published a history of Campbell Soup and the development of Prego called, It's in There!. [3]
In 1986 after growth had leveled off, Campbell's Soup consulted with Howard Moskowitz, a practitioner in the field of psychophysics. His process involved the development of variations of ingredients in the formula. After placing numeric values to testers' perception on variants, a model was created to modify recipes, maximizing perceived taste while minimizing costs. [4] Moskowitz' work systematized the process Schilling and Hildebolt had run with taste-testers during initial product development. As a result of that work, Schilling's initial recipe was materially sweetened just prior to launch, reflecting consumers' growing preference for sugary flavors and contributing to the product's immediate blockbuster success. [3]
Prego achieved over $100 million in sales and 28% market share in its first year, an astonishing accomplishment for a food brand entering an established market. Beyond the product innovations, Prego's marketing was also considered extraordinary with credit given to Laurel Cutler of Leber Katz who was brought in very early during the product's development, and Herb Baum, a Campbell's marketing director at the time, who backed an aggressive marketing and roll-out plan over the objections of other executives. [3]
The brand was involved in a controversy when it featured Clara Peller in one of its ads. The elderly woman was shown holding a gigantic prop jar of one of the meaty varieties of Prego, saying: "I finally found it!" It was a reference to her earlier work in ads for Wendy's Restaurants and the catchphrase "Where's the beef?". Wendy's had not authorized her appearance in the Prego advertisement and stopped using Peller in its campaigns. [5] [6] [7]
In March, 2024 the History Channel featured the story of the development of Prego on its show, "The Food that Built America" in the premier episode of season five. The episode is entitled, "All American Marinara". [8]
The H. J. Heinz Company is an American food processing company headquartered at One PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was founded by Henry J. Heinz in 1869. Heinz manufactures a couple thousand food products in plants on six continents, and markets these products in more than 200 countries and territories. The company claims to have 150 number-one or number-two brands worldwide. Heinz ranked first in ketchup in the US with a market share in excess of 50%; the Ore-Ida label held 46% of the frozen potato sector in 2003.
Spaghetti is a long, thin, solid, cylindrical pasta. It is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine. Like other pasta, spaghetti is made of milled wheat, water, and sometimes enriched with vitamins and minerals. Italian spaghetti is typically made from durum-wheat semolina. Usually the pasta is white because refined flour is used, but whole wheat flour may be added. Spaghettoni is a thicker form of spaghetti, while spaghettini is a thinner form. Capellini is a very thin spaghetti, sometimes known colloquially as "angel hair pasta", while Vermicelli refers to intermediate widths, varying between the United States and Italy.
Tomato sauce can refer to many different sauces made primarily from tomatoes, usually to be served as part of a dish, rather than as a condiment. Tomato sauces are common for meat and vegetables, but they are perhaps best known as bases for sauces for Mexican salsas and Italian pasta dishes. Tomatoes have a rich flavor, high water content, soft flesh which breaks down easily, and the right composition to thicken into a sauce when stewed without the need for thickeners such as roux or masa. All of these qualities make them ideal for simple and appealing sauces.
Clara Peller was a Russian-born American manicurist and television personality who, already an octogenarian, starred in the 1984 "Where's the beef?" advertising campaign for the Wendy's fast food restaurant chain, created by the Dancer Fitzgerald Sample advertising agency.
SpaghettiOs is an American brand of canned ring-shaped pasta in tomato sauce. It is marketed to parents as "less messy" than regular spaghetti. More than 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year. They are sold in tomato sauce and with additions including meatballs, pieces of processed meat resembling hot dog slices, beef-filled ravioli, and calcium-fortified spaghetti.
Romanian cuisine is a diverse blend of different dishes from several traditions with which it has come into contact, but it also maintains its own character. It has been mainly influenced by Turkish and a series of European cuisines in particular from the Balkan Peninsula, or Hungarian cuisine as well as culinary elements stemming from the cuisines of Central Europe.
Czech cuisine has both influenced and been influenced by the cuisines of surrounding countries and nations. Many of the cakes and pastries that are popular in Central Europe originated within the Czech lands. Contemporary Czech cuisine is more meat-based than in previous periods; the current abundance of farmable meat has enriched its presence in regional cuisine. Traditionally, meat has been reserved for once-weekly consumption, typically on weekends.
Noodle soup refers to a variety of soups with noodles and other ingredients served in a light broth. Noodle soup is a common dish across East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Himalayan states of South Asia. Various types of noodles are used, such as rice noodles, wheat noodles and egg noodles.
Italian-American cuisine is a style of Italian cuisine adapted throughout the United States. Italian-American food has been shaped throughout history by various waves of immigrants and their descendants, called Italian Americans.
Oxtail soup is a soup made with beef tails. The use of the word "ox" in this context is a legacy of nomenclature; no specialized stock of beef animals are used and tails may come from bovines other than oxen. It is believed by some that oxtail soup was invented in Spitalfields in London in the seventeenth century by French Huguenot and Flemish immigrants, from the tails of animals. Different versions of oxtail soup exist: Korean; Chinese; a fried/barbecued oxtail combined with soup variation which is a popular dish in Indonesia where it is called as sop buntut; an ethnic dish of the American South which traces its lineage back to the pre-revolutionary war era; and a thick, rich, gravy-like soup popular in the United Kingdom since the 18th century. Creole oxtail soup is made from a tomato base with oxtails, potatoes, green beans, corn, mirepoix, garlic, and herbs and spices.
The cuisine of Minnesota is a type of Midwestern cuisine found throughout the state of Minnesota.
Howard Moskowitz is an American market researcher and psychophysicist. He is known for the detailed study he made of the types of spaghetti sauce and horizontal segmentation. By providing a large number of options for consumers, Moskowitz pioneered the idea of intermarket variability as applied to the food industry.
Pastelón is a Dominican and Puerto Rican dish. The dish is prepared differently on both islands.
Mushroom ketchup is a style of ketchup that is prepared with mushrooms as its primary ingredient. Originally, ketchup in the United Kingdom was prepared with mushrooms as a primary ingredient, instead of tomato, the main ingredient in contemporary preparations of ketchup. Historical preparations involved packing whole mushrooms into containers with salt. It is used as a condiment and may be used as an ingredient in the preparation of other sauces and other condiments. Several brands of mushroom ketchup were produced and marketed in the United Kingdom, some of which were exported to the United States, and some are still manufactured as a commercial product.
Filipino spaghetti is a Filipino adaptation of Italian spaghetti with Bolognese sauce. It has a distinctively sweet sauce, usually made from tomato sauce sweetened with brown sugar and banana ketchup. It is typically topped with sliced hot dogs or smoked longganisa sausages, giniling, and grated cheese. It is regarded as a comfort food in Philippine cuisine. It is typically served on almost any special occasion, especially on children's birthdays.
Kwetiau ayam, kuetiau ayam or sometimes kwetiau ayam kuah is a common Chinese Indonesian dish of seasoned flat rice noodles topped with diced chicken meat. It is often described as a kwetiau version of the popular mie ayam, and especially common in Indonesia, and can trace its origin to Chinese cuisine.
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