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Comment by chronogram | Hacker News Reader

My bottle of Heinz right here on the ingredient list says: "Ingredients: Tomatoes (200g per 100g Tomato Ketchup), vinegar, lemon juice from concentrate, potassium chloride, acid (malic acid), citrus fiber, spice and herb extracts (contain CELERY), sweetener (sucralose)" how many more tomatoes does it need?

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200g of tomato per 100g of ketchup is a very weird way of putting it, but if I understand how they’ve written it to mean 200g of tomato goes into each 100g portion of ketchup, then that’s basically 10g of tomato solids for each 100g of ketchup (assuming 95% of tomato is water, which I think it is). Doesn’t actually seem like that much.

Disclaimer - I am not a smart person and could be very wrong on all of this.

I've checked some other brands online and it makes me wonder if it's due to a local ketchup law or simply a marketing thing. Store brand 156 per 100, organic store brand 120 per 100, competing brand 140 per 100, a different competing brand 180 per 100, Heinz classic 148 per 100, Heinz organic 180 per 100. They all mention it.

Counting solids doesn't make sense unless you're evaluating ketchup powder. Ketchup itself is mostly water.

By that reasoning if you sold someone a tomato, that's 10g of tomato solids for each 200g of tomato, and actual tomatoes need to be labelled as "contains 5% tomato".

Not really, the tomato is 5% tomato solids and 100% tomato. The ketchup is some percentage solids and another percentage vinegar, so unless they use tomato vinegar..

maybe it's not that much, but it's more than an actual tomato has

This is just cronyism, so "how many tomatoes does it need" is an ever shifting line that is always somewhere in the middle between how many Heinz use and how many Osem use. IIRC the actual difference is rather small.

(Well, this isn't strictly true, IIRC there have been a few changes over the years to both of their recipes and the regulations and Heinz were allowed to call themselves Ketchup for some of the time, but you get my point)

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