Talk:Stadium Mustard

Corrections to article

The following was received from David Dwoskin by OTRS, and reproduced here by permission.

Hello,

My name is David Dwoskin, President and Owner of The Authentic Stadium Mustard. I established Davis Food Co. in 1969 to make The Authentic Stadium Mustard available beyond the corridors of The Cleveland Stadium. Stadium Mustard is the only product I sell.

Because Stadium Mustard is the cornerstone of my business, I cannot ignore any news stories or articles that question its authenticity. I have taken great care to preserve the quality of a delicious mustard that has become synonymous with Cleveland. I will continue to do so.

In 1969 I contacted the manufacturer who made the mustard for the CIeveland Stadium. They had a distributor that was selling the stadium with their mustard, and their recipe, it was Joe Bertman. I arranged to sell the same mustard to supermarkets, > designed a label, and gave the product an official name "The Authentic Stadium Mustard", named after the Cleveland Stadium. A written agreement was made.

In 1982, Bertman lost his rights to distribute that mustard. He then went to another manufacturer and came out with a different brown mustard and called it, The Original Bertman Ball Park Mustard. It was not the same mustard recipe that he was selling to the Cleveland Stadium. His new mustard has 20% sugar and 120 mg sodium. Stadium Mustard has never had any sugar and has only 65 g of sodium.

I have not changed the recipe and have tasted every batch of mustard for the past 44 years before it is packed. I still continue to sell to stadiums, supermarkets and other venues, the exact same mustard, made by the same manufacturer for me, for the past 44 years.

My story has been told in The Wall Street Journal {Mustard and Memories} May 14 1993; October 2, 1977 The Plain Dealer published a column on Alvin Friedlander, the concessions manager at the Cleveland Stadium in the l950s. When asked about the mustard, Friedlander said; "You can buy it now in small jars at supermarkets. It's called Stadium Mustard. Same stuff exactly."

In another column by Jim Parker "Pass the Mustard", May 10, 1983, Pat Mazoh, Bertman's daughter was asked: Is the Original Ballpark Mustard the exact same mustard you have been selling the Stadium since 1950? She replied, "Well, no, my father is always interested in quality," Mazoh said. "This is the new, improved, Ball Park Mustard."

Please correct the Wikipedia History page on Stadium Mustard so that it reads the truth and tells the real history of Stadium Mustard. Stadium Mustard is a Registered Trademark.

Your immediate attention would be greatly appreciated.

David Dwoskin, President
DAVIS FOOD COMPANY

I intend to update this article with new or corrected information as sources can verify. ~Amatulić (talk) 23:40, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Revision proposal

A proposed revision (not written by me) can be found here: Stadium Mustard/Revision proposal. Please discuss before making wholesale changes to this article. In particular, existing material already cited to reliable sources should not be removed.

I have reverted the recent attempts to replace the article with that proposed version, and semi-protected the article to facilitate further discussion on this talk page. ~Amatulić (talk) 15:18, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Representatives of Davis Food Co. have been very vocal here, but we need to take care to get both sides of this story. The two companies each claim to be the sole purveyor of the genuine product. This dispute has gone on for a long time, and we shouldn't give undue weight to one side. Here are some more sources I quickly turned up.

• "Cleveland Fans: Mustard Can't Cut It". The Philadelphia Inquirer. April 26, 1989.
• Feran, Tom (August 16, 2009). "Whatever happened to the feud between Stadium Mustard and Ball Park Mustard, both Cleveland-made condiments?". The Plain Dealer.
• "The Cork Controversy". The Splendid Table. May 9, 2009.
• "Joseph Bertman, Inc". The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. January 27, 2003.
• Greenberg, Gail; Rolfe, Diane. "Bertman Ballpark Mustart". Cleveland Historical.

I'm sure there are plenty more sources out there, too. - Eureka Lott 16:54, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I find the whole movement by the alleged editor to rewrite the article to be highly suspect. First, it (the revision)sounds like an advertisement to me, and second, based on the known history of the company (a lot of it has been featured in various Cleveland news/media sources over the years) there will always be a dispute about who invented it. Why now? Why Wikipedia? I've been eating the stuff (and reading about it) for over 3+ decades and I've never heard of the Illinois-based version of the story... or seen it advertised on the bottle. Something's fishy here. I agree with your edit notes: take it slow.Ryecatcher773 (talk) 19:24, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I have incorporated the proposed changes as best as I could without losing previous information, and without introducing a promotional tone. The original article was weighted toward Bertrand's mustard, the proposed version by Davis Food Company was weighted toward them. Hopefully my revision is more balanced. The references mentioned above by Ryecatcher773 should be incorporated also. ~Amatulić (talk) 16:38, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Contradictory information

The "History" and "Cleveland's Mustard Controversy" containing conflicting dates for when Authentic Stadium Mustard was registered: 1970 and 1971. Also, the sentence stating that there was only one mustard in 1986 seems incorrect/misleading and out of place in the narrative. Overall, this article seems to be very poorly written. Captainroz (talk) 19:53, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I changed "1986" to "1966" in reference to Cleveland having only one brown mustard as of that date. It's the only date that allows the rest of the paragraph to make sense, with the current references. It's a statement that remains true even if the second mustard was released later, given the fact that one mustard originated in the 1970s. The mistake might be from the referenced article at cleveland.com, which says that there was only one mustard "twenty-five years ago", as of 2009. Now, the article mentions that "in the early 1980s" Bertman Original mustard began to compete with Stadium Mustard. If 1986 or thereabouts is the date when there were two stadium-style mustards available in Cleveland, the article can be updated to show that.

I'm here mostly because I'd like to try the hot dogs; I've never been to Cleveland and I know nothing of the controversy. I made the change because I wanted the article to make sense as it was written. Roches (talk) 20:19, 25 August 2017 (UTC)