If Only We Just Made Ketchup

If you were starting again today, knowing that your expertise was going to be fully automated, would you take the same bet?

If there’s a product, any product, that you’d like to work on, knowing that the build itself would be mostly automated, would it still be something digital, online?

To make any product, we still need taste. Is digital where, if you started over, you’d still develop your taste?

—

The recipe for Heinz Ketchup is, notoriously, closely guarded. The product, of course, is unique. There are other ketchups, but there is only one Heinz Ketchup.

And part of the recipe is their production system. So many variables are automated, and even when tweaked, the same result, the same taste, is assured.

They even have a team of professional testers — tasters — paid experts in the Heinz Ketchup taste, to make sure there’s never any drift in the product’s quality.

Heinz Ketchup might now just be a robust manufacturing system, but there are actual humans making sure Heinz Ketchup, the experience, keeps its top spot.

—

The antidote today to product drift and production cost, in digital systems, is more systems, more automation.

That takes out the craft, in a sense, but it doesn’t take out the need for quality. Not completely. Not even close. Quality, especially top quality, is still up to someone with risk to take, with taste to test, with something to lose.

There’s still a product with Heinz-level quality to make, maybe, in your field, or in another one that calls to you.

Automate what you can to get there, but please give it a try, because some people are just waiting for you to invent it.