10 ms·

When every ketchup but one went extinct (2022)

84 points by AaronM 3y ago

xav0989 3y ago
I wonder what additives are currently in good that we’ll discover to be harmful in the future. 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.
- frogulis 3y ago
  Is that so? As an Aussie, Heinz is not a new brand for me, but I definitely associate them with beans before ketchup (tomato sauce (dead horse in rhyming slang)). Canned baked beans are not thought of as a natural nor healthy option - is that the perception of Heinz as a company in NA, or is it just the ketchup product that's thought of as better/safer/more natural?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Your comment reminded me of the Mad Men story arc (set in the 60s) which is about Heinz being associated with beans, not ketchup. In the US, today I'd say Heinz is almost overwhelmingly associated with ketchup, so it's interesting that their ad efforts didn't make it to Oz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDiCW6wlFBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDiCW6wlFBc
    - frogulis 3y ago
      These days they may have a better association with "ketchup". My sister affirms that (Heinz) ketchup and tomato sauce are distinct products, but I'm not so sure.
      - jraph 3y ago
        For me, a ketchup is tomato purée / paste + suger + salt + some vinegar + possibly some seasoning (pepper, herbs...). Tomato sauces is a larger category of any kind of tomato based sauce in which we could shoehorn ketchup. A tomato sauce could be purely salted and without any sugar in it, though a pinch of sugar can mitigate the acidic taste.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      "Beanz Meanz Heinz" is etched into my memory from my youth in the UK. Certainly when I think of Heinz I think of beans not ketchup.
      - jjkaczor 3y ago
        Huh - they once ran ads for ketchup that said something like: "Heinz, there are no other Kinds": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JplL1XzVV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JplL1XzVV4
    - drivingmenuts 3y ago
      I've bought Heinz Beans at a grocery store in Austin. In the import section. And they weren't bad, but not great either.
    - foobar1962 3y ago
      The Australia market was dominated by Fountain Tomato Sauce, and possibly Master Foods. Heinz Ketchup wasn't easy to find, and it may have been named Tomato Sauce rather than Ketchup here.
  - nkrisc 3y ago
    As an American, I had to do a terrible impression of an Aussie accent to hear how “sauce” and “horse” could possibly rhyme. As for Heinz, my impression has always been that it’s the standard, mass-produced supermarket fare that is probably not healthy/natural. Nothing they make that much of that lasts for so long can possibly be so.
    - frogulis 3y ago
      They rhyme perfectly in an Australian accent :D Not rhotic, plus the vowel in "sauce" tends towards "or" rather than "ah". Hope that's a comprehensible explanation of our esoteric pronunciation :)
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      The science of long lasting food is well known. Boiling kills most bacteria. Acid kills the leftover Botulism spores (one of the few diseases that survive boiling). Seal while hot and the food can stay good for a year or longer. Tomatoes already are near the acid point that kills botulism. Just gotta lower pH a little more with either lemons or vinegar. And bam, success. A professional would need to measure the pH to be sure as acidity levels differ. But we've been canning tomatoes for nearly two centuries now, the science is well tested and well figured out. > Nothing they make that much of that lasts for so long can possibly be so. Refrigeration was invented long after preserved foods. You couldn't match a Roman Legion 500 miles without preservatives. Salt, olive oil and wheat. It must have sucked to be a Roman Legion but less so than other troops. It's why 1lb of salt was worth 1lb of gold back then. The secrets of long lasting food (fermentation, salt, and other methods) is millennia old. Canning is relatively new (boiling+sealing simultaneously), a 1800s era discovery. But canning's health effects are well studied.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        Do you mean salt was worth as much as gold, literally?
        dragontamer 3y ago
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    In the US, Heinz is definitely more associated with ketchup. When Americans think of canned baked beans (which is rarely), Van Camp's is arguably more well-known. When I think of Heinz these days I think of the politician John Kerry, because he's married to the heir to the Heinz family fortune. But that's mostly because my brain is weird.
- CraigJPerry 3y ago
  Heinz do different kinds of Ketchup, the no added salt one tastes just like regular european heinz ketchup (i.e. not as cloyingly sweet). I remember the ingredients didn't have HFCS listed on the bottle and we put it down to that being the difference.
  - xav0989 3y ago
    Heinz US also does a “simply” ketchup with sugar instead of HGCS and no artificial dyes, and when you compare ingredient lists, that same “specialty” ketchup is the one that’s sold as regular ketchup in Canada.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    Not adding salt makes it less sweet? Or is there some more differences?
    - CraigJPerry 3y ago
      I don't recall exactly but the ingredients lists were pretty different. The no salt one had tomatoes and maybe 2 or 3 other ingredients, the regular one had a few more ingredients although as i recall nothing weird except HFCS was one item.
- code_duck 3y ago
  Food coloring would be news to me. I haven’t seen that in any ingredient lists… looking at Heinz’s website now, it does not list any dyes in the ingredients for their standard ketchup.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  So, the odd thing here is that, while, yes, most preservatives used in the early 20th century were extremely dodgy, sodium benzoate, while controlled, remains legal, and considered safe at reasonable levels. This was as much marketing as anything, in this particular case.
- derbOac 3y ago
  Interestingly, I was listening to a podcast once and they were interviewing a researcher with Heinz who said one of their R&D goals is developing tomato varieties that are sweet enough to be used in making ketchup without added sugar. I don't remember what podcast it was and don't know if Heinz is still doing that but at the time they sounded like it was a big focus for them, for financial as well as health reasons. Gastropod has a good episode on ketchup; it might have been the one I'm thinking of but it might not. It covers many of the same things as this article but in more depth with certain things.
- infecto 3y ago
  > 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 Amazing the leaps you took to make this statement. 1) There are no food dyes that I am aware of. 2) I don't think the science is conclusive that HFCS is any worse than sugar. 3) They make many varieties, some which use cane sugar instead of HFCS. 4) What does this have anything to to with the US?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ (2013) > Both controversy and confusion exist concerning fructose, sucrose, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with respect to their metabolism and health effects. These concerns have often been fueled by speculation based on limited data or animal studies. In retrospect, recent controversies arose when a scientific commentary was published suggesting a possible unique link between HFCS consumption and obesity. Since then, a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome. This equivalence is not surprising given that both of these sugars contain approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose, contain the same number of calories, possess the same level of sweetness, and are absorbed identically through the gastrointestinal tract. [...]
    - infecto 3y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9551185/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9551185/ (2022) > In conclusion, analysis of data from the literature suggests that HFCS consumption was associated with a higher level of CRP compared to sucrose, whilst no significant changes between the two sweeteners were evident in other anthropometric and metabolic parameters We could go back and forth all day long posting studies from nih.gov, lets not be silly. I don't think what you have provided disproves my statement. The science is inconclusive, we don't know that HFCS is materially worse than sugar. I think we can say sugar in any form is not great in large quantities but I don't think we know for certain how worse, if any, HFCS is compared to natural sugar.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  Heinz: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Salt, Spice, Onion Powder, Natural Flavoring Heinz Simply: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, Cane Sugar, Salt, Onion Powder, Spice, Natural Flavoring Heinz No Sugar Added: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled White Vinegar, Salt, Natural Flavoring, Stevia Leaf Extract (Not Normally Found in Ketchup), Onion Powder Heinz No Salt Added: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled White Vinegar, Sugar, Potassium Chloride (Not in Regular Ketchup), Natural Flavoring, Spice, Onion Powder Heinz Organic: Organic Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Organic Tomatoes, Organic Distilled Vinegar, Organic Sugar, Salt, Organic Onion Powder, Organic Spice, Natural Flavoring Heinz Jalapeno: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Salt, Dried Jalapeno Peppers, Spice, Onion Powder, Natural Flavors, Bell Pepper Juice Concentrate There are probably others, those are the ones listed at one store.
- michael1999 3y ago
  Gums. Indigestible. Used in place of flour or corn starch as a thickener or emulsifier. They can be quite irritating to some people.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  'sucralose'. Which is a trade name, not a descriptive name. There's no way that won't be found to be toxic. I recently had a health scare where I was inadvertently consuming a lot of it in a coffee creamer: the label color had changed and I thought nothing of it, but it represented a change in sweetener from monkfruit/stevia to 'sucralose'. Came damn close to going to the hospital. Gut pain and sweats and pooping lighter and lighter shades as my organs shut down (at least from producing bile). Figured out the change, dumped all the 'sucralose' and after a week or so returned to normal health, no other changes in diet or behavior at all. I don't know why it's not banned already, but it must be hella profitable.
Ringz 3y ago
It sounds like there is only Heinz ketchup in all supermarkets in the USA. Is that so? In Europe (at least Italy, Germany, Austria) there are many different types of ketchup and manufacturers in supermarkets.
- keiferski 3y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives available, it's more that Heinz is just "the default."
  - robolange 3y ago
    Yes, and the alternatives are more or less identical to Heinz. The diversity of flavors and textures that this article talks about no longer exists.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I don't think that's true at all, except for the most generic of grocery stores. Case in point: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup There are also an innumerable amount of other sauces that include tomatoes and can be considered variants or ketchup-adjacent.
      - robolange 3y ago
        Naturally on the Internet there is an infinite variety. But using that Whole Foods site to filter the list to what's physically available at stores in my area, it reduces down to a list that's more or less Heinz and Heinz-like.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      I find all ketchup that isn't Born Ketchup pretty much disgusting.
      - Ennea 3y ago
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
"And because it [cat-sup] was fermented, it boasted a shelf life of one to seven years." does that really follow?
- frogulis 3y ago
  I've heard of Indian dry mango pickles that are ~20 years old! I guess a product that is dominantly colonised by harmless bacteria is unlikely to be taken over by nasty things, unless it sports food that is tasty to harmful organisms and not friendly ones. Maybe the best defence is the dominant bacterium having eaten all the available sugars so that little further fermentation can occur (and the bottle won't explode)
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    > I guess a product that is dominantly colonised by harmless bacteria is unlikely to be taken over by nasty thing much like human skin, gut, etc.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    When I was a kid, the pickles we bought would last 2-3 years in some cases - only typically being eaten at special meals like christmas, new years, easter, birthdays. These days I wouldn't trust a modern shop bought pickle to last more than a couple of months before they start to look like they're growing fungus. I don't know what changed, but something did, and commercial pickles these days do not stay safe to eat.
- tokai 3y ago
  Yeah its one of the points of fermenting. Maybe even the point of fermentation. "Fermentation was primarily developed for the stabilization of perishable agricultural produce." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/food-fermentation https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/food-ferme...
- MilaM 3y ago
  Yes! Fermentation of fresh foods with lactic acid bacteria increases the acidity of foods and hence the shelf life. As far as I know, though, you also have to add salt to suppress the growth of less desirable microorganisms. Edit: You can skip the fermanation step by pickling your vegetables with a suitable vinegar. The taste will be much different though.
mschuster91 3y ago
> 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. This sounds suspiciously similar to the US practice of washing poultry meat with chlorine and eggs with water (which massively reduces its shelf life).
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > This sounds suspiciously similar to the US practice of washing poultry meat with chlorine You mean the exact same thing Europeans do with leafy greens? But one is a target of economic protectionism and the other isn't, so it must be scary in that specific case. > eggs with water (which massively reduces its shelf life). Ok, and?
fedeb95 3y ago
it's not that hard to do your own ketchup, or some quicker variants of it. 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
- bluGill 3y ago
  I see a lot of recipes that call for ketchup, but they also call for all the ingredients in ketchup as well. I often just substitute an extra can of tomatoes, some sugar and spices.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  Your recipe seems to be missing tomatoes (assuming you weren’t going for an onion ketchup?).
  - fedeb95 3y ago
    it is. I willingly gave a variant to do in the absence of tomatoes. You can add them and get a more proper ketchup (I wrote optionally add tomato sauce, but it's true most people call ketchup only what has tomato in it. To me, the taste is quite similar even in the absence of tomatoes, what really gives the ketchup signature taste, again my opinion, is the balance of vinegar/sugar).
  - frogulis 3y ago
    On the topic of non-tomato ketchup, a video that has stuck with me over the years: https://youtu.be/29u_FejNuks https://youtu.be/29u_FejNuks
keiferski 3y ago
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. https://www.heinzlofts.com https://www.heinzlofts.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex
nottorp 3y ago
> Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen. Long tradition of competing on anything but merits :)
- strawhatguy 3y ago
  And to encourage the government to rule your competitors' products are 'unsafe', maybe even forbid selling altogether...
- daedrdev 3y ago
  To be clear the full sentence said: > Thanks in part to high-quality ingredients, Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen So it was higher quality and had the biggest advertising campaign.
SeanLuke 3y ago
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.
- pxeger1 3y ago
  Wiktionary[1] says it’s “probably ultimately from Hokkien Chinese 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”)”. So not a million miles off? [1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup
  - SeanLuke 3y ago
    chiap sure? Ke no. In Cantonese, fish is yu. But yeah. Also: I had thought it was originally Malay.
    - arp242 3y ago
      Malay "ketjap" or "kecap" (different types of soy sauces) comes from Chinese "kê-chiap". It may be directly inspired by Malay languages without knowledge of Chinese and still be "ultimately from Hokkien Chinese".
    - samatman 3y ago
      Hokkien/Min and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible languages.
      - SeanLuke 3y ago
        Of course. We were talking about the coincidence in Cantonese.
    - resolutebat 3y ago
      膎 preserved fish, not 鱼 plain old fish.
contrarian1234 3y ago
Is the current formulation still free of preservatives? 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)
- eru 3y ago
  Ketchup has a lot of vinegar, ie it's pretty sour. That alone helps with preservation.
- palmfacehn 3y ago
  Salt and vinegar are preservatives, but there are no benzoates in Heinz. In other countries I have encountered preservatives, added colors and even artificial thickeners in some brands.
  - greggsy 3y ago
    The thickeners are (along with the obvious reason of thickness) to avoid ‘serum’, which is the undesirable blurt of pale, watery liquid that comes out of you don’t shake it enough.
    - treadmill 3y ago
      Or you could, you know, shake the bottle instead of adding crap to the ketchup.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Shaking has the additional benefit of reducing the viscosity and making it easier to dispense, due to ketchup being thixotropic.
      - palmfacehn 3y ago
        That and poor sauce technique. Part of the problem here is people not closing the bottle at the table. Humidity condenses inside of the bottle, which is typically still cold from the refrigerator.
cafard 3y ago
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.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  A weekend if you're fancy :-) I found that tomato paste, sugar, vinegar and ground up pickling spice was good enough for me. And only took 15 minutes.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    What’s pickling spice?
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      It's a spice mix that's used in pickling vegetables. https://www.allrecipes.com/article/pickling-spice/ https://www.allrecipes.com/article/pickling-spice/
danielvaughn 3y ago
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.
- wmil 3y ago
  Banana ketchup (dyed red) became popular in the Phillipines during and after WWII. There were tomato shortages. Huy Fong Foods Sriracha is basically just red jalapeno ketchup. If you can switch your brain to thinking of it as grape dipping sauce you'd probably like it.
nemo44x 3y ago
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a thing on ketchup years ago called “The Ketchup Conundrum”. [1] 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. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-conundrum https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  I wouldn't say it's perfect or the only balanced ketchup, but it fits very well into its role and is hard to consistently improve on in ways that are strictly better for the final product and competitive with its cost. It's a notorious "newb trap" for chefs. You see a place making their own ketchup, that stuff might be good but you know they don't have a seasoned professional's view of where value is made. It takes hours of labor to make ketchup for something that in the end doesn't make your burger taste better than heinz does.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    People continue to make ketchups that people say they prefer after a single bite and it’s usually because they have a certain flavor that stands out. But they don’t see return customers. Similar to soda. Coke has just the right combination of things that no one else is close. Pepsi used to do a blind taste test and people preferred Pepsi after a single taste. But it’s 1-dimensional and people quickly tire of it. Coke eventually comes out on top. “Perfect” is subjective but the article describes a ratings system that super tasters use. Heinz ketchup comes out perfect. And the lack of competition proves it.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Eh don't be so credulous about shit malcolm gladwell says lol. Heinz's dominance probably comes down to the usual matrix of suitability across a large set of uses, consistency, cost, marketing, familiarity. I'm agreeing with you that it's very well balanced and nearly impossible to broadly beat at its price point. My former-professional opinion is that they hit a local maximum around price and flexibility, not that they somehow have the one perfect food product on the planet though.
bigie35 3y ago
Kinda weird about atlas obscura articles every since it was discovered several articles have been faked. Granted all those articles were from one author, but I still remain a bit skeptical.
slipperybeluga 3y ago
[dead]
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584 - Sept 2022 (120 comments) When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)
postepowanieadm 3y ago
Mushroom ketchup is quite nice, easy way of disposing stale mushrooms. I must try using wild mushrooms one day.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
I moved from the UK to the US and was disappointed to learn that Heinz ketchup is different here. The taste is not the same. 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.
schmichael 3y ago
> 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. 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!
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Secret ingredient here must be sugar/corn-syrup. Makes a good thickener. Don’t need preservatives when your sugar concentration is high enough. And who doesn’t love sweet? (Acidity from vinegar helps too)
unstatusthequo 3y ago
I for one love the low sugar/salt Sir Kensington’s brand. Has what I want, and less of what I don’t.

84 points by AaronM 3y ago

I wonder what additives are currently in good that we’ll discover to be harmful in the future. 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.

frogulis 3y ago
Is that so? As an Aussie, Heinz is not a new brand for me, but I definitely associate them with beans before ketchup (tomato sauce (dead horse in rhyming slang)). Canned baked beans are not thought of as a natural nor healthy option - is that the perception of Heinz as a company in NA, or is it just the ketchup product that's thought of as better/safer/more natural?
- keiferski 3y ago
  Your comment reminded me of the Mad Men story arc (set in the 60s) which is about Heinz being associated with beans, not ketchup. In the US, today I'd say Heinz is almost overwhelmingly associated with ketchup, so it's interesting that their ad efforts didn't make it to Oz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDiCW6wlFBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDiCW6wlFBc
  - frogulis 3y ago
    These days they may have a better association with "ketchup". My sister affirms that (Heinz) ketchup and tomato sauce are distinct products, but I'm not so sure.
    - jraph 3y ago
      For me, a ketchup is tomato purée / paste + suger + salt + some vinegar + possibly some seasoning (pepper, herbs...). Tomato sauces is a larger category of any kind of tomato based sauce in which we could shoehorn ketchup. A tomato sauce could be purely salted and without any sugar in it, though a pinch of sugar can mitigate the acidic taste.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    "Beanz Meanz Heinz" is etched into my memory from my youth in the UK. Certainly when I think of Heinz I think of beans not ketchup.
    - jjkaczor 3y ago
      Huh - they once ran ads for ketchup that said something like: "Heinz, there are no other Kinds": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JplL1XzVV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JplL1XzVV4
  - drivingmenuts 3y ago
    I've bought Heinz Beans at a grocery store in Austin. In the import section. And they weren't bad, but not great either.
  - foobar1962 3y ago
    The Australia market was dominated by Fountain Tomato Sauce, and possibly Master Foods. Heinz Ketchup wasn't easy to find, and it may have been named Tomato Sauce rather than Ketchup here.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  As an American, I had to do a terrible impression of an Aussie accent to hear how “sauce” and “horse” could possibly rhyme. As for Heinz, my impression has always been that it’s the standard, mass-produced supermarket fare that is probably not healthy/natural. Nothing they make that much of that lasts for so long can possibly be so.
  - frogulis 3y ago
    They rhyme perfectly in an Australian accent :D Not rhotic, plus the vowel in "sauce" tends towards "or" rather than "ah". Hope that's a comprehensible explanation of our esoteric pronunciation :)
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    The science of long lasting food is well known. Boiling kills most bacteria. Acid kills the leftover Botulism spores (one of the few diseases that survive boiling). Seal while hot and the food can stay good for a year or longer. Tomatoes already are near the acid point that kills botulism. Just gotta lower pH a little more with either lemons or vinegar. And bam, success. A professional would need to measure the pH to be sure as acidity levels differ. But we've been canning tomatoes for nearly two centuries now, the science is well tested and well figured out. > Nothing they make that much of that lasts for so long can possibly be so. Refrigeration was invented long after preserved foods. You couldn't match a Roman Legion 500 miles without preservatives. Salt, olive oil and wheat. It must have sucked to be a Roman Legion but less so than other troops. It's why 1lb of salt was worth 1lb of gold back then. The secrets of long lasting food (fermentation, salt, and other methods) is millennia old. Canning is relatively new (boiling+sealing simultaneously), a 1800s era discovery. But canning's health effects are well studied.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Do you mean salt was worth as much as gold, literally?
      - dragontamer 3y ago
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  In the US, Heinz is definitely more associated with ketchup. When Americans think of canned baked beans (which is rarely), Van Camp's is arguably more well-known. When I think of Heinz these days I think of the politician John Kerry, because he's married to the heir to the Heinz family fortune. But that's mostly because my brain is weird.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
Heinz do different kinds of Ketchup, the no added salt one tastes just like regular european heinz ketchup (i.e. not as cloyingly sweet). I remember the ingredients didn't have HFCS listed on the bottle and we put it down to that being the difference.
- xav0989 3y ago
  Heinz US also does a “simply” ketchup with sugar instead of HGCS and no artificial dyes, and when you compare ingredient lists, that same “specialty” ketchup is the one that’s sold as regular ketchup in Canada.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Not adding salt makes it less sweet? Or is there some more differences?
  - CraigJPerry 3y ago
    I don't recall exactly but the ingredients lists were pretty different. The no salt one had tomatoes and maybe 2 or 3 other ingredients, the regular one had a few more ingredients although as i recall nothing weird except HFCS was one item.
code_duck 3y ago
Food coloring would be news to me. I haven’t seen that in any ingredient lists… looking at Heinz’s website now, it does not list any dyes in the ingredients for their standard ketchup.
rsynnott 3y ago
So, the odd thing here is that, while, yes, most preservatives used in the early 20th century were extremely dodgy, sodium benzoate, while controlled, remains legal, and considered safe at reasonable levels. This was as much marketing as anything, in this particular case.
derbOac 3y ago
Interestingly, I was listening to a podcast once and they were interviewing a researcher with Heinz who said one of their R&D goals is developing tomato varieties that are sweet enough to be used in making ketchup without added sugar. I don't remember what podcast it was and don't know if Heinz is still doing that but at the time they sounded like it was a big focus for them, for financial as well as health reasons. Gastropod has a good episode on ketchup; it might have been the one I'm thinking of but it might not. It covers many of the same things as this article but in more depth with certain things.
infecto 3y ago
> 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 Amazing the leaps you took to make this statement. 1) There are no food dyes that I am aware of. 2) I don't think the science is conclusive that HFCS is any worse than sugar. 3) They make many varieties, some which use cane sugar instead of HFCS. 4) What does this have anything to to with the US?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/ (2013) > Both controversy and confusion exist concerning fructose, sucrose, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) with respect to their metabolism and health effects. These concerns have often been fueled by speculation based on limited data or animal studies. In retrospect, recent controversies arose when a scientific commentary was published suggesting a possible unique link between HFCS consumption and obesity. Since then, a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome. This equivalence is not surprising given that both of these sugars contain approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose, contain the same number of calories, possess the same level of sweetness, and are absorbed identically through the gastrointestinal tract. [...]
  - infecto 3y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9551185/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9551185/ (2022) > In conclusion, analysis of data from the literature suggests that HFCS consumption was associated with a higher level of CRP compared to sucrose, whilst no significant changes between the two sweeteners were evident in other anthropometric and metabolic parameters We could go back and forth all day long posting studies from nih.gov, lets not be silly. I don't think what you have provided disproves my statement. The science is inconclusive, we don't know that HFCS is materially worse than sugar. I think we can say sugar in any form is not great in large quantities but I don't think we know for certain how worse, if any, HFCS is compared to natural sugar.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
Heinz: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Salt, Spice, Onion Powder, Natural Flavoring Heinz Simply: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, Cane Sugar, Salt, Onion Powder, Spice, Natural Flavoring Heinz No Sugar Added: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled White Vinegar, Salt, Natural Flavoring, Stevia Leaf Extract (Not Normally Found in Ketchup), Onion Powder Heinz No Salt Added: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled White Vinegar, Sugar, Potassium Chloride (Not in Regular Ketchup), Natural Flavoring, Spice, Onion Powder Heinz Organic: Organic Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Organic Tomatoes, Organic Distilled Vinegar, Organic Sugar, Salt, Organic Onion Powder, Organic Spice, Natural Flavoring Heinz Jalapeno: Tomato Concentrate from Red Ripe Tomatoes, Distilled Vinegar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Salt, Dried Jalapeno Peppers, Spice, Onion Powder, Natural Flavors, Bell Pepper Juice Concentrate There are probably others, those are the ones listed at one store.
michael1999 3y ago
Gums. Indigestible. Used in place of flour or corn starch as a thickener or emulsifier. They can be quite irritating to some people.
Applejinx 3y ago
'sucralose'. Which is a trade name, not a descriptive name. There's no way that won't be found to be toxic. I recently had a health scare where I was inadvertently consuming a lot of it in a coffee creamer: the label color had changed and I thought nothing of it, but it represented a change in sweetener from monkfruit/stevia to 'sucralose'. Came damn close to going to the hospital. Gut pain and sweats and pooping lighter and lighter shades as my organs shut down (at least from producing bile). Figured out the change, dumped all the 'sucralose' and after a week or so returned to normal health, no other changes in diet or behavior at all. I don't know why it's not banned already, but it must be hella profitable.

Ringz 3y ago

It sounds like there is only Heinz ketchup in all supermarkets in the USA. Is that so? In Europe (at least Italy, Germany, Austria) there are many different types of ketchup and manufacturers in supermarkets.

keiferski 3y ago
There are plenty of alternatives available, it's more that Heinz is just "the default."
- robolange 3y ago
  Yes, and the alternatives are more or less identical to Heinz. The diversity of flavors and textures that this article talks about no longer exists.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I don't think that's true at all, except for the most generic of grocery stores. Case in point: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup There are also an innumerable amount of other sauces that include tomatoes and can be considered variants or ketchup-adjacent.
    - robolange 3y ago
      Naturally on the Internet there is an infinite variety. But using that Whole Foods site to filter the list to what's physically available at stores in my area, it reduces down to a list that's more or less Heinz and Heinz-like.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    I find all ketchup that isn't Born Ketchup pretty much disgusting.
    - Ennea 3y ago

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

"And because it [cat-sup] was fermented, it boasted a shelf life of one to seven years." does that really follow?

frogulis 3y ago
I've heard of Indian dry mango pickles that are ~20 years old! I guess a product that is dominantly colonised by harmless bacteria is unlikely to be taken over by nasty things, unless it sports food that is tasty to harmful organisms and not friendly ones. Maybe the best defence is the dominant bacterium having eaten all the available sugars so that little further fermentation can occur (and the bottle won't explode)
- zabzonk 3y ago
  > I guess a product that is dominantly colonised by harmless bacteria is unlikely to be taken over by nasty thing much like human skin, gut, etc.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  When I was a kid, the pickles we bought would last 2-3 years in some cases - only typically being eaten at special meals like christmas, new years, easter, birthdays. These days I wouldn't trust a modern shop bought pickle to last more than a couple of months before they start to look like they're growing fungus. I don't know what changed, but something did, and commercial pickles these days do not stay safe to eat.
tokai 3y ago
Yeah its one of the points of fermenting. Maybe even the point of fermentation. "Fermentation was primarily developed for the stabilization of perishable agricultural produce." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/food-fermentation https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/food-ferme...
MilaM 3y ago
Yes! Fermentation of fresh foods with lactic acid bacteria increases the acidity of foods and hence the shelf life. As far as I know, though, you also have to add salt to suppress the growth of less desirable microorganisms. Edit: You can skip the fermanation step by pickling your vegetables with a suitable vinegar. The taste will be much different though.

mschuster91 3y ago

> 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. This sounds suspiciously similar to the US practice of washing poultry meat with chlorine and eggs with water (which massively reduces its shelf life).

deaddodo 3y ago
> This sounds suspiciously similar to the US practice of washing poultry meat with chlorine You mean the exact same thing Europeans do with leafy greens? But one is a target of economic protectionism and the other isn't, so it must be scary in that specific case. > eggs with water (which massively reduces its shelf life). Ok, and?

fedeb95 3y ago

it's not that hard to do your own ketchup, or some quicker variants of it. 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

bluGill 3y ago
I see a lot of recipes that call for ketchup, but they also call for all the ingredients in ketchup as well. I often just substitute an extra can of tomatoes, some sugar and spices.
robin_reala 3y ago
Your recipe seems to be missing tomatoes (assuming you weren’t going for an onion ketchup?).
- fedeb95 3y ago
  it is. I willingly gave a variant to do in the absence of tomatoes. You can add them and get a more proper ketchup (I wrote optionally add tomato sauce, but it's true most people call ketchup only what has tomato in it. To me, the taste is quite similar even in the absence of tomatoes, what really gives the ketchup signature taste, again my opinion, is the balance of vinegar/sugar).
- frogulis 3y ago
  On the topic of non-tomato ketchup, a video that has stuck with me over the years: https://youtu.be/29u_FejNuks https://youtu.be/29u_FejNuks

keiferski 3y ago

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. https://www.heinzlofts.com https://www.heinzlofts.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Heinz_Company_complex

nottorp 3y ago

> Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen. Long tradition of competing on anything but merits :)

strawhatguy 3y ago
And to encourage the government to rule your competitors' products are 'unsafe', maybe even forbid selling altogether...
daedrdev 3y ago
To be clear the full sentence said: > Thanks in part to high-quality ingredients, Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen So it was higher quality and had the biggest advertising campaign.

SeanLuke 3y ago

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.

pxeger1 3y ago
Wiktionary[1] says it’s “probably ultimately from Hokkien Chinese 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”)”. So not a million miles off? [1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  chiap sure? Ke no. In Cantonese, fish is yu. But yeah. Also: I had thought it was originally Malay.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Malay "ketjap" or "kecap" (different types of soy sauces) comes from Chinese "kê-chiap". It may be directly inspired by Malay languages without knowledge of Chinese and still be "ultimately from Hokkien Chinese".
  - samatman 3y ago
    Hokkien/Min and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible languages.
    - SeanLuke 3y ago
      Of course. We were talking about the coincidence in Cantonese.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    膎 preserved fish, not 鱼 plain old fish.

contrarian1234 3y ago

Is the current formulation still free of preservatives? 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)

eru 3y ago
Ketchup has a lot of vinegar, ie it's pretty sour. That alone helps with preservation.
palmfacehn 3y ago
Salt and vinegar are preservatives, but there are no benzoates in Heinz. In other countries I have encountered preservatives, added colors and even artificial thickeners in some brands.
- greggsy 3y ago
  The thickeners are (along with the obvious reason of thickness) to avoid ‘serum’, which is the undesirable blurt of pale, watery liquid that comes out of you don’t shake it enough.
  - treadmill 3y ago
    Or you could, you know, shake the bottle instead of adding crap to the ketchup.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Shaking has the additional benefit of reducing the viscosity and making it easier to dispense, due to ketchup being thixotropic.
    - palmfacehn 3y ago
      That and poor sauce technique. Part of the problem here is people not closing the bottle at the table. Humidity condenses inside of the bottle, which is typically still cold from the refrigerator.

cafard 3y ago

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.

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
A weekend if you're fancy :-) I found that tomato paste, sugar, vinegar and ground up pickling spice was good enough for me. And only took 15 minutes.
- huytersd 3y ago
  What’s pickling spice?
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    It's a spice mix that's used in pickling vegetables. https://www.allrecipes.com/article/pickling-spice/ https://www.allrecipes.com/article/pickling-spice/

danielvaughn 3y ago

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.

wmil 3y ago
Banana ketchup (dyed red) became popular in the Phillipines during and after WWII. There were tomato shortages. Huy Fong Foods Sriracha is basically just red jalapeno ketchup. If you can switch your brain to thinking of it as grape dipping sauce you'd probably like it.

nemo44x 3y ago

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a thing on ketchup years ago called “The Ketchup Conundrum”. [1] 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. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-conundrum https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...

giraffe_lady 3y ago
I wouldn't say it's perfect or the only balanced ketchup, but it fits very well into its role and is hard to consistently improve on in ways that are strictly better for the final product and competitive with its cost. It's a notorious "newb trap" for chefs. You see a place making their own ketchup, that stuff might be good but you know they don't have a seasoned professional's view of where value is made. It takes hours of labor to make ketchup for something that in the end doesn't make your burger taste better than heinz does.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  People continue to make ketchups that people say they prefer after a single bite and it’s usually because they have a certain flavor that stands out. But they don’t see return customers. Similar to soda. Coke has just the right combination of things that no one else is close. Pepsi used to do a blind taste test and people preferred Pepsi after a single taste. But it’s 1-dimensional and people quickly tire of it. Coke eventually comes out on top. “Perfect” is subjective but the article describes a ratings system that super tasters use. Heinz ketchup comes out perfect. And the lack of competition proves it.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Eh don't be so credulous about shit malcolm gladwell says lol. Heinz's dominance probably comes down to the usual matrix of suitability across a large set of uses, consistency, cost, marketing, familiarity. I'm agreeing with you that it's very well balanced and nearly impossible to broadly beat at its price point. My former-professional opinion is that they hit a local maximum around price and flexibility, not that they somehow have the one perfect food product on the planet though.

bigie35 3y ago

Kinda weird about atlas obscura articles every since it was discovered several articles have been faked. Granted all those articles were from one author, but I still remain a bit skeptical.

slipperybeluga 3y ago

[dead]

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32774584 - Sept 2022 (120 comments) When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32557361 - Aug 2022 (1 comment)

postepowanieadm 3y ago

Mushroom ketchup is quite nice, easy way of disposing stale mushrooms. I must try using wild mushrooms one day.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

I moved from the UK to the US and was disappointed to learn that Heinz ketchup is different here. The taste is not the same. 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.

schmichael 3y ago

> 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. 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!

Scoundreller 3y ago
Secret ingredient here must be sugar/corn-syrup. Makes a good thickener. Don’t need preservatives when your sugar concentration is high enough. And who doesn’t love sweet? (Acidity from vinegar helps too)

unstatusthequo 3y ago

I for one love the low sugar/salt Sir Kensington’s brand. Has what I want, and less of what I don’t.