Title: How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bo
Headings: How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bottle
How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bottle
From a 17th-century fish sauce, ketchup evolved into a patent medicine, a carcinogenic health hazard, and eventually, a non-Newtonian fluid. Here’s how ketchup’s rich history is reflected in the design of a bottle of Heinz.
Editor’s Note
Why Tomato Ketchup?
Why Is The Bottle Transparent?
57 Varieties
Timeless

Content: Of course, prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (and as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously showed), the food manufacturing business as a whole could largely be described with these same memorable adjectives. But ketchup was particularly bad. In fact, when you opened a bottle, the contents could literally kill you. The reasons ketchup was such vile, potentially deadly slop are varied, but start with the shortness of the tomato season. Lasting from mid-August until mid-October, ketchup could only be made fresh for two months out of the year. However, by the late 19th century, Americans were used to expecting ketchup year around. A year’s worth of ketchup could not be made in two months, so manufacturers preserved tomato pulp to meet yearly expectations. It wasn’t a bad strategy, except for the fact that they did so with the same carelessness, filthiness, and lack of quality control that was endemic in the food manufacturing industry at the time. Entire barrels of pulp were stored so badly that, when open, they were found to be filled with mold, yeast, spores, and deadly bacteria. At a time when no one else cared, Heinz was obsessed with making his products as pure as possible.