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In the annals of world gastronomy, the southern German town of Singen doesn't usually get a mention. You won't find pictures of its drab postwar apartment blocks featured in glossy lifestyle magazines, and the nearest Michelin-starred restaurants are around Stuttgart, 150 km away. If people come through here at all, it's either because they're visiting the ruined 10th century castle that's perched on a volcanic hilltop outside town, or because they're on their way to Switzerland, a few miles to the south.

Yet what Singen lacks in hedonistic allure, it more than makes up for in tomato soup. Not to mention Handtaschen Outlet  bouillon cubes, pea pottage, dried broccoli, instant-noodle dishes and literally hundreds of sauces, flavorings and other prepared foods, particularly those that are dehydrated and sold around the globe in packets. Ever since a Swiss miller named Julius Maggi set up a factory here in 1887 to produce his eponymous Maggi's Suppenw a liquid condiment used in soups and sauces, Singen has been a sizable but overlooked landmark on the culinary map, a sort of world capital of desiccated vegetables. It's also a great place to come for a crash course in the intricacies of global taste and national preferences. For it is here, in an unremarkable three-story building just up the road from the police station and the Maggi plant, that you can discover why Chinese noodles are different from Italian ones, why Austrians turn up their noses at German soups (and vice versa), and why chicken broth is different the world over even if it carries the same brand name and comes in more or less the same packaging. (To find answers to the equally complex question of which ice cream flavors most appeal to consumers in Finland requires a three-hour car ride across Switzerland, but more on that later.)

The Singen building in question is part of a global network of research-and-development establishments run by Nestl the world's largest food company. Nestl is headquartered in Switzerland and sells its products in 130 countries. It has owned Maggi since 1947. In an age of rampant globalization, when consumers across the world increasingly seem to crave the same sort of products, from Coca-Cola and Harry Potter novels to Starbucks coffee and Louis Vuitton handbags, you might think that a food Louis Vuitton Taschen  company with annual sales of $80 billion would be eager to join this push towards standardization and sameness. Wouldn't it be easier, and more profitable, for a company like Nestl to ignore national nuances and come up with a single type of, say, bean soup, ice cream or noodle that would have universal appeal?

Well, no. Thomas Hauser, who runs the Singen center, smiles patiently at the question before repeating the company mantra. "In food," he says, "you have to be very local."

It's an insight born of 140 years of experience, and it's one that Nestl takes very, very seriously. One of its biggest worldwide brands is Nescaf instant coffee. But there is Nescaf and Nescaf the one you buy in Singapore is quite different from the one you'll find in Spain or Swaziland or S Paulo. In fact, the company makes about 200 different types of Nescaf ranging from the "three-in-one" sachets on sale in parts of Asia which contain the supposedly perfect mix of coffee, milk and sugar for local taste to the considerably more expensive jars of freeze-dried Colombian Nescaf aimed at French coffee snobs. And it's not just the brand variants that are different: the 800-or-so components that go into Nescaf are subtly tweaked http://www.taschenonlineoutlets.de/ to fit national preferences.

The same thing goes for chocolate. A KitKat bar is the same the world over, right? Wrong. Leave aside the Japanese variant, where strawberry, banana or other fillings change seasonally; even the more commonly found chocolate-covered wafer bars can look and taste different depending on where you buy them. A Russian KitKat is slightly smaller than a Bulgarian one, for example, and the chocolate isn't as sweet as in a German one. It's the job of a Nestl confectionary factory in York, England, to juggle these small nuances in taste by adding or subtracting key ingredients like sugar or cocoa during the production process, depending on where the finished bars are slated to go on sale.