> A few years later, after a woman in Pennsylvania sent Heinz a dozen bottles of her homemade, tastier, better-looking, benzoate-free ketchup, they adopted her recipe, which was also sweet, vinegary, and thick.<p>This is a throwaway sentence mid article, but it makes it sound like the recipe that allowed Heinz to dominate was from an unpaid woman! Heinz had already figured out how to make ketchup shelf stable without preservatives, but I'm intrigued to know if he would have "won" without her recipe!
> Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. <i>But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen</i>.<p>Long tradition of competing on anything but merits :)
What confuses me is that, though as I understand it Ketchup was a general term to decscribe a variety of sauces, in Cantonese it sounds exactly like Tomato ("Ke") Paste ("tchup"). Given its origins in southeast Asia, I had assumed that could not possibly be a coincidence.
When I lived in NYC, I would frequent this coffee shop down near Little Italy. They had a grape ketchup for sale. I never bought one but always wanted to try it. I'd probably hate it because my brain is so hard-wired to think of ketchup as a tomato-based sauce, but I was still curious about it.
A fun fact: in Pittsburgh (where Heinz is from), many of the original industrial buildings have been remodeled into luxury lofts. I have only been outside the complex, so I can't confirm if there are any lingering tomato smells.<p><a href="https://www.heinzlofts.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.heinzlofts.com</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex</a>
> Many companies had used benzoates to hide poor sanitation and low-quality tomatoes. Ketchup was often made from leftover tomato trimmings that were stored poorly and then bottled with a heavy dose of benzoate, which also covered up factories’ shoddy sanitization practices that would otherwise breed mold and bacteria.<p>This sounds suspiciously similar to the US practice of washing poultry meat with chlorine and eggs with water (which massively reduces its shelf life).
Discussed at the time (of the article):<p><i>When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584</a> - Sept 2022 (120 comments)<p><i>When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361</a> - Aug 2022 (1 comment)
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a thing on ketchup years ago called “The Ketchup Conundrum”. [1]<p>It’s worth a read as it goes deep into the history of ketchup but more so it investigates food tasting, super tasters, etc. It turns out that Heinz Ketchup is essentially a perfect food in terms of taste. People don’t get tired of it and other ketchups come and go because they are all ultimately flawed. Some grab people initially but they tire of it because it isn’t balanced. Heinz is as are a few other products the article talks about.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-conundrum" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...</a>
If you have an open weekend in the late summer, you can make your own ketchup. We did this a couple of summers just over twenty years ago. Then we bought an old house, and there were no open weekends.
Is the current formulation still free of preservatives?<p>It's great the bottles don't spoil after being packaged, but I assume once opened all the careful boiling done at the beginning becomes irrelevant. And it's always been unclear to me how long you can keep a bottle around from that point onward! Especially say at a diner, where the bottle is non-refrigerated and sitting for days/months/years (periodically topped up)
I wonder what additives are currently in good that we’ll discover to be harmful in the future.<p>Also interesting that Heinz’s ketchup (in be the US) is now full of high fructose corn syrup and artificial food dyes, when (from the article) it started as the better/safer/more natural option.
it's not that hard to do your own ketchup, or some quicker variants of it.<p>One I do:
- chop some onions
- put some oil in a pot
- cook the onions at not too high heat
- after a few minutes, add soy sauce, vineagr, a good amount of sugar, pepper (optionally tomato sauce; exact quantities and spices depend on your unique taste)
- keep cooking for at least 40 minutes with a lid on. now and then check if it's too dry add water
It sounds like there is only Heinz ketchup in all supermarkets in the USA. Is that so?<p>In Europe (at least Italy, Germany, Austria) there are many different types of ketchup and manufacturers in supermarkets.
Kinda weird about atlas obscura articles every since it was discovered several articles have been faked.<p>Granted all those articles were from one author, but I still remain a bit skeptical.
I moved from the UK to the US and was disappointed to learn that Heinz ketchup is <i>different</i> here. The taste is not the same.<p>But then I discovered that in the US they sell a variant called "Simply", which seems to be the same recipe as the UK/EU version.