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: Tomato ketchup was not only popular, but because of the teachings of an influential quack promulgated by the patent medicine trade, tomato ketchup was actually considered to be a sort of tonic, a condiment that was actually healthier than normal ketchup. advertisement
At the time, though, nothing could be further from the truth. Why Is The Bottle Transparent? advertisement
“Filthy, decomposed and putrid.” These were the words that cookbook author Pierre Blot used in 1866 to describe the quality of commercial ketchups being sold at the time. 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.