How Red Sauce Became a Status Symbol
Mar 11, 2026
What you’re putting on your pasta says a lot about who you want to be.
Remember when people would see a jar of Ragú and think, That’s Italian! Since it launched in 1937, the red sauce had for decades a corner on the market, unless you count Prego, the other leading brand, which arrived 40-plus years later and never quite edged its way into the American vernacular. Ragú started as a mom-and-pop operation run out of a residential kitchen in Rochester, New York—founders Giovanni and Assunta Casitano were selling it from their front porch—and success led to a factory space; once they sold the Ragú label to a corporation in 1969, the jarred sauce hit the big time.
