I think I’ve mention in the past that when our daughter Kelly was little, she wanted ketchup on everything. Her opinion was — in fact maybe the opinion of most reasonable, intelligent people — ketchup was a miracle sauce. But I’ve noticed that every time I pick up a bottle of Heinz ketchup, the little label near the neck of the bottle says that there are at least 56 more varieties of this magical concoction.
But that’s not true. Actually, I think there is only one type of ketchup — tomato. It turns out that Henry J. Heinz didn’t get his start in the condiment industry by selling ketchup. He was born in Pittsburgh and began his food-sales career before he was a teenager selling vegetables that he grew himself.
Later, his main job was managing the family brick-making business, but he began selling prepared horseradish door to door. He didn’t get into the ketchup game until later after he’d already built a relatively large condiments business selling horseradish, pickles, and sauerkraut.
At the time that Heinz came up with his famous slogan, he wasn’t offering 57 sauce varieties, but he was peddling more than 60 kinds of food, including something called “euchred pickles.” Hines sauce bottles still today contain a “57 varieties” label. There is a lot of speculation as to what it means. Some guessed it was because the company was founded in a year ending 1ith 57, others speculated it was how many tomatoes were in each bottle, and one person guessed that the placement of the label had to do with it being the best place to squeeze the sauce our of the bottle.
It turns out that the “57 varieties” label on the neck of the Heinz Ketchup was chosen completely at random by Henry Heinz. Heinz decided he needed a number logo after he spotted a shoe company advertising 21 styles of shoes. Some believe that five was Heinz’s lucky number and seven was his wife’s lucky number. But the number 57 was apparently just a totally random number.
Today the Heinz company sells more than a thousand products, ranging from baby food to barbecue sauce. Of course only one of these products really matter — and most America-loving citizens know what it is.
So it’s good to know where the 57 came from, but I still don’t know the difference between catsup and ketchup.
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