Prego
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prego® is a trade mark brand name pasta sauce of Campbell Soup Company. It was introduced in 1981 internationally and is based on a family recipe of one of the chefs. Eventually they became the number one selling dry grocery product of the decade.
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[edit] Flavors
Currently, Prego offers many different varieties of sauce. The traditional pasta sauce is available in seventeen different flavors with marinara, mini meatball, zesty mushroom, and roasted garlic parmesan among them. In the Prego Organic line, the two flavors (Organic Mushroom and Organic Tomato and Basil) are made with all organic ingredients with the same Prego pasta sauce taste. A third line in the Prego Pasta Sauce family is the Hearty Meat meat sauce. It comes in Meatball Parmesan, Authentic Italian Sausage, and Three Meat Supreme. Yet another line is the Chunky Garden Pasta Sauce consisting of flavors such as Garden Combination, Mushroom Supreme, Mushrooms & Green Pepper, and Tomato, Onion & Garlic. These four sauces contain some amount of vegetables.
[edit] Product Design
The actual flavors of the original sauces were created with the help of Howard Moskowitz, a known practitioner in the field of psychophysics. The process involved the developement of systematic variations of specific ingredients in the formula which then were tried by voluntary subjects. After placing numeric values to each tester's perception on each of the variants, a mathematical model was created to develop the final recipe, which maximized the perceived taste while minimizing the cost of the ingredients needed to produce it.
[edit] Marketing
The brand was involved in a commercial 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 catch phrase, "Where's the Beef?" Wendy's had not authorized her appearance in the Prego commercial and stopped using Peller in its campaigns.
[edit] Origin of Name
"Prego" is a very common Italian and Spanish family name. It is also Italian for "I Pray", and is often used where in English, one would say, "You're welcome."
