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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

Heinz ketchup is on a whole different level; it's not just that it's the default ketchup (which it is), it's that:

1) When ketchup is called for, there isn't a substitute condiment that's kind of similar. Sriracha in general is a subset of hot sauces, but nobody thinks of a general case for ketchup--it's just ketchup. Maybe there are situations where no hot sauce but sriracha will do, but that's much rarer in the US (where Huy Fong dominates the market).

2) There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups. The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets. It's Andy Warhol's old observation that the President drinks the same Coke that you do, only more so--there are way more niche colas than niche ketchups.

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In Europe it’s pretty common to have non-Heinz ketchup, of which there are many[0] kinds[1]. Even in America, where Heinz is super popular, I can remember eating other[2] ketchups as far back as the 1980’s. And nowadays even my supermarket has fancy ketchups here in rural California, though that may be a CA thing.

0: https://hungarianmeatmarket.com/product/univer-ketchup/

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=dutch+catsup&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF...

2: https://www.delmonte.com/products/tomatoes/condiments/ketchu...

Heinz hurt itself a little bit when they stopped making it with Canadian tomatoes and shut down a plant here, then a (US-based!) competitor (French’s) grabbed some market-share at the low end with a Canadian-based product.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/french-s-heinz-ketchup-leam...

I much prefer French's and this news article makes it taste even better!

The same applies to Norway. The most popular ketchup is not even Heinz, but a national brand

https://meny.no/varer/middagstilbehor/ketchup-og-sennep/ketc...

Idun Ketchup FTW! Their new unsweetened variant, also with less salt and no preservatives, is pretty good and should be export material!

Also interestingly, for example here in southern Africa we don't really have ketchup, we only eat tomato sauce (as the closest relative).

We did have a Heinz SA, but they are failing and will be discontinued. I'm guessing that all the locals stuck to their preferred brands and no one else made enough of an inroad.

3. https://www.hela.eu/en/hela-at-home/products/product-finder/...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hela_Gew%C3%BCrzwerk_Hermann_L... which I prefer over any Heinz(I have tried so far). Though I have not much use for Ketchup, so can't tell with certainty.

2) Been to plenty of restaraunts that tout house-made ketchup. Sure Heinz has natural recipe variations out now, but the dijon of ketchup would be small batch sourced from garden fresh tomatoes and high end vinegar.

I've seen plenty of brands in specialty markets that are more expensive than Heinz for that reason.

I may be in a bit of a bubble then; I think I've only been to one restaurant that made their own ketchup (for their duck-fat fries, and they were definitely an outlier). I'm sure now that I'm looking out for them, I will now see high-end small-batch ketchups everywhere.

I've seen it once or twice.

I'm curious how trends will go in the future -- maybe next year will be all about artisanal small-batch ketchups, who knows -- but it wouldn't surprise me if ~everyone who likes ketchup on things is perfectly happy with Heinz 57 and ~most people who want something else for their burgers, fries or steaks want something different. BBQ sauce, mayo, mustard, sriracha, guac, mole... and not just "ketchup, but better".

Like, imagine your friend excitedly dragging you to a new restaurant, where they serve their house-made fries with ________. The world of things that can go in that blank is so large I have a hard time imagining "artisanal ketchup" being the thing that wins out.

Whataburger uses and now bottles and sells their own ketchup. I think it is phenomenal, and I'm a fan of Heinz.

I was looking for Whataburger as a counterexample here to the sentiment that there are no widespread Heinz alternatives and found it in your comment. It’s the perfect counterexample to OP’s comment in multiple ways -

1. It’s widespread (not even artisanal) in the regions it is deployed in. I can walk into my neighborhood grocery store in Texas and always expect to see Whataburger Spicy Ketchup in the condiment aisle.

2. The spicy ketchup is a genuinely superior product to Heinz. It just straight up tastes better, feels less sugary, and it’s far enough ahead in quality that I actively seek it out over “regular” ketchup.

Humor piece about restaurants that make their own ketchup:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/we-do-our-own-li...

> There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups.

Yeah, there are. Lots, actually.

> The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better

Sure, they do (lots of them—as with mustards contrasted with basic French’s yellow, plenty of different styles—for different foodies, some that are refinements of the mass market style, e.g., Annie’s Organics entry, but lots that go with more distinct flavor, especially spice, profiles; Maya Kaimal Spicy Ketchup would be an example in this category.) What there might not be is a Grey Poupon equivalent, a succesfully mass-marketed mass-appeal entry brand to the not-the-basic-thing segment.

The fancy Dijon ketchup never tastes better though. It just tastes different, and sometimes worse.

Heinz has had decades and armies of food scientists and tasters to dial in their recipe. The only way to compete with that is to make a ketchup that is less appealing to the average person but more appealing to some niche subset of people (e.g. crank up or down the acidity or sweetness).

> he only way to compete with that is to make a ketchup that is less appealing to the average person but more appealing to some niche subset of people

You sound like it's some kind of bizzarre weird strategy that only few insane weirdos would try. As in fact that's how most of the food brands (by number, not by volume) would work - find your niche and serve it. And not only food, of course. Some produce average food for "average person", some produce excellent food for people that value it. That's how it has always been.

I don't agree. The reason that average people eat average quality food is because they get paid average wages, not because they don't value the good stuff.

For instance, pretty much anybody will prefer high quality ice cream to basic ice cream, but the reason that basic ice cream still exists is because the fancy stuff costs 5x more.

The problem with making a "fancy" ketchup is that ketchup is a completely artificial food. The quality of a ketchup is in how balanced it is. And balancing a ketchup is a fixed cost not a marginal cost. Whoever makes the most revenue will have the best ketchup.

> The reason that average people eat average quality food is because they get paid average wages, not because they don't value the good stuff.

Tastes really aren't universal and, more than that, have a certain average (though there is large individual variation) contribution from familiarity and other path-dependent effects.

Do average people eat average food because of average income, or average tastes, of average tastes due to average income? Each is part of the story (and how much of a part each is varies from person to person and category of food.)

I have very hard time believing it. Food that I consider above average may be a little more expensive, but mainly because it's much less mass-produced. And there's better quality ice cream that costs roughly about the same (though much harder to find), and terrible quality ice cream that costs more. We don't have to go far - Coca Cola earns billions selling basically caffeinated sugar water. Not because people don't have any money to buy better drinks. Because people want to buy specifically sugar water, because they have learned that's what cool people drink.

Finding a working ketchup formula may be not easy. But you have to do it once. Then that's it, you can sell it forever. And it doesn't take that much. As well as it doesn't take it that much to not just stuff tomato paste with as much sugar as chemistry would allow and call it "ketchup". And yet, mass brands to that and a lot of people happily buy it.

Better stuff may cost more, because of smaller volumes and better quality controls, but not 5x. At least not all of them. I just checked the list of ketchups in Whole Foods. Heintz is 17c per ounce. 365 brand is 8.7c/oz. Others range from 18c to 73c, pretty much equally distributed. Yes, there's one 5x brand - but that's one, out of a dozen. And that's just one store, I'm sure there are more brands which will occupy the whole gamut from 1x to 10x (I am sure somebody somewhere sells a ketchup for more than a dollar per oz, even if I haven't seen one).

> The fancy Dijon ketchup never tastes better though.

To your taste, sure. For lots of people, the same thing is true of dijon (and other not-French’s-yellow) mustard.

OTOH, plenty of people disagree with you on that, which is why there are established, succesful—if individually mostly niche—alternatives.

> Heinz has had decades and armies of food scientists and tasters to dial in their recipe.

So did French’s. The hard part of getting broad reach on alternatives isn’t making some alternative that enough people will like if they try, but getting enough people over the activation energy threshold to try. Grey Poupon’s breakout marketing campaign in the 80s did that for mustard; there hasn't been an equivalent for ketchup.

And, sure, that probably doesn’t unseat the dominant player, but that’s not what thr uothread discussion of “dijon” alternatives was about.

> There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups. The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets.

Sure there are. There's lots of alternative ketchups both on the health scale (less or no high fructose corn syrup) and taste scale (spicier, smokier, you name it).

I use ketchup semi-regularly but haven't bought the Heinz type in ages (primarily to avoid so much fructose, but it's also fun to experiment with the different flavors).

To add to dragonwriter’s response, I raise you Sir Kensington’s [1]. They’re popular in San Francisco (used at Super Duper Burgers, for example) and available at Whole Foods and on Good Eggs.

Even Heinz offers its own organic variant [2], but IIRC it’s not particularly different from the regular.

Finally, the category also includes tomato “jam” (and some might include tomato chutney), tomato-based BBQ sauces, and even tomato-based salsa (commonly used for egg dishes in place of ketchup).

[1] https://www.sirkensingtons.com/product/ketchup

[2] https://www.heinz.com/product/00013000008990

But I disagree - I used to buy Heinz by default, but switched to "Wilkin & Sons Tiptree Tomato Sauce"

Heinz is a 'default' - and absence of it used to indicate the replacement was worse. Now - plenty of better options, just maybe without the brand recognition.

Heinz is a good baseline - you know what you're getting.

I grew up on Heinz, but nowadays it tastes overly processed and heavy (and too sweet) to me. I'll usually get Annie's if it's available. I'll still eat Heinz if that's what's there, but I don't prefer it.

Hunt's, and Red Gold are two larger brands that I see frequently.

There are niche ketchups. I buy them from time to time - since regular ones (including Heinz) have too high sugar content, and also I don't like the taste of Heinz one. So yes, there are different ketchups - and there are different soft drinks too, by the way.

Whole Foods has over 10 brands of ketchup: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup including their own "365" label. It suggests to me if everybody were buying Heinz, they probably wouldn't bother doing their private label?

3) Thanks to us all being fed a steady diet of Heinz ketchup since we were in the womb, all other forms of ketchup taste wrong.

Bit of a food snob here, I usually buy a "fancy" alternative to Heinz even if it's just the Annie's Organic bottle that's also mass-manufactured but to me has a richer vegetable taste and less saccharine sweetness to it. Heinz tastes a bit too much like HFCS-sweetened tomato frosting to me.

Been using Heinz organic ketchup w real sugar (no hfcs) for quite awhile. Tastes great - same grams of sugar per serving as Annies.

Perhaps not fancy, but French’s ketchup is much better, at least in Canada. Less sweet, more tomato flavour.

In India, and stretching into the Indian diaspora worldwide, Maggi Hot and Sweet sauce became extremely popular, and for some things such as samosas you can almost never use the regular Heinz ketchup - it has to be paired with Maggi Hot and Sweet.

Yeah, heinz tastes weird ... The Indian palate is more used to the Maggi ketchup/sauce taste profile

Funny. As a german I avoid anything Maggi, while spicing up my pizzas ('Diavolo' which is basically a Pizza Salami with some added red onion stripes and pepperoni) with varying tandoori spice mixes, sometimes chili in addition, about 2 dozen jalapeno slices and Sri Racha :-)

Just an anecdotal response:

In Quebec there is a pretty proud history of a much different style of ketchup, which is much sweeter with bigger chunks of tomatoes.

It's not uncommon to see traditional-style ketchup options in restaurants and at grocery stores.

> The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets.

I'm not convinced that's the case. I mean, yeah, I buy Heinz to go with fries or on my beyond burger, but for a brief time I made my own ketchup using a very simple recipe I found on a youtube channel but substituting my own spice blend and it was amazing. In the end though my palette is not very picky and my inherent laziness won out.

So since I know ketchup can be better than Heinz, I have to expect that there is in fact a fancy branded ketchup out there that is.

> Maybe there are situations where no hot sauce but sriracha will do, but that's much rarer in the US

There are many cases where sriracha not not general hot sauce would work such as dim sum and pho.

And before you counter with "in the US", I'd argue that Huy Fong is much more dominant in California than in the US at large and in California, cuisines where only sriracha type hot sauce and not just any general hot sauce works are much more common.

Perhaps it's a regional thing, but there are definitely places where Red-Gold usage comes close to Heinz. I'd still say Heinz is dominant in said regions, but Red Gold does see usage, and I don't think it's just because of a price difference.

Personally, I like Red Gold on fries more than Heinz. Couldn't explain why very easily as I'm not one to use food terms. Maybe a bit more acidic?

For anyone interested, this is a pretty interesting read about Ketchup and Heinz:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...

I haven't had Heinz on my table for years and I have young kids.

Curious, here in Sweden I'd say Heinz is pretty close to the bottom of the supermarket ketchup totem pole, while Coke/Pepsi have their usual near-duopoly.

Sweden I'd say Heinz is pretty close to the bottom of the supermarket ketchup totem pole

Really? I'd say it's nr 2 after Felix.

I'd put Slotts in between the two, at least.

Tiptree from England, it’s on Amazon we do have preferences I put Ketchup on my Catsup

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