How can mass produced products like Salsa taste the same every time when the vegetables they contain have so many variables?
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It’s all about the averages. They make huge batches at a time using specific quantities of ingredients in each batch, usually measured by weight.
Yeah, individual green peppers might taste a tiny bit different from each other but 500 green peppers are gonna taste like 500 green peppers.
In food production they have quality assurance labs. Batches of products are tested for acidity, brix (sweetness), color, consistency, etc. There is an acceptable range for all tests. If a product falls out of range, adjustments are made to that batch. Those codes on packaging can provide information for what precise batch it came from. This is also very critical in the event a food product must be recalled.
The solution to pollution is dilution. Same principle applies. There may be some variants in the veggies, but when they are mixed together in giant quantities. Even if you have a spicier pepper than the next one, it’ll be diluted out in the batch and that’s where you get your consistency.
Like peeing in the pool, your few ounces of pee doesn’t have enough volume to change the whole pool to pee. Gross, but same concept.
Measuring by weight is the key factor here. Getting a perfectly homogeneous mixture with non-soluble ingredients is pretty much impossible, but getting the proportions correct is much easier to achieve. The next factors are quality control and supply chain management. To deliver a consistent product, the components of that product need to be delivered in a consistent condition. Some businesses can choose to go vertical, and have fine-grained control by owning the production of their raw materials/ingredients. Others have less control/consistency and depend on b2b partnerships to deliver goods. Generally these partnerships are governed by SLA’s to help ensure consistency and reliability of service.
Because when you take 20,000 tomatoes and reduce them into mush in a single pot, any one cup you could scoop out is functionally identical to any other one cup.
You have whole teams of people who work on taste quality control! It’s not just food, even something as simple as beer is a real skill to maintain consistency year on year between different harvests.
A lot of people here are discussing how working in large batches averages out the fluctuations caused by variation in the fresh ingredients.
That’s true, but there’s another factor, too. A good friend of mine spent a few years at a job where he’d take samples of the product and adjust the recipe with seasonings, so if one batch needed a little more garlic powder, say, he’d add it. Well, actually he’d write down an order someone else to add a certain amount. Apparently the adjustments were often in increments like you might buy at Costco, because the batches were so large. 😀
Imagine two people singing, one who is good(on key) one who is bad (off key). The resulting sound will be the average between them, so it will never sound as good as the good singer, but also not as bad as the bad singer.
Now add 20 more people, and you will find that the singing now sounds pretty good regardless of the quality of each individual singer. Just like with two singers the quality regresses towards the average.
With large groups the average off key in either direction cancels out and regresses to on key. So in large enough groups you often end up with a decent quality of singing.
Same with making food stuffs. The food that is maybe a little to bitter, or a little to sweet will cancel each other out leaving the most average taste.
So you don’t get stunning quality, but you get consistent quality
Usually, most mass-produced foods tend to be homogenized for processing, and then flavoring is added, ensuring it ends up as the same
A lot of people are mentioning averages, QA, and other methods to keep the same flavor.
These companies make gigantic batches of salsa.
They probably put out millions of bottles of salsa per batch and if you buy one or two every month then you won’t know the difference since it’s the same batch.
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