17
Things You Didn't Know About Heinz Ketchup
By FBWorld Team
Heinz
totally dominates the ketchup market, so we compiled 17
facts that will help you totally dominate any conversation
on the subject.
Wikipedia
Fact
1. Heinz sells a whopping 11bil packets of ketchup a year,
which is two packets for every person on the planet, and
two billion packets for every person currently in space
(six!).
Flickr/DGERobertson
2. Tomatoes didn't make it into ketchup until the late
1800s, since most right-minded people considered it a
poisonous cousin to nightshade.
GraniteSchools.org
3. Tap the 57 on the bottleneck in order to make the ketchup
pour more quickly. Apparently 11% of Americans already
know this trick while the rest of us silently suffer from
snail-like pouring speeds.
Dover
Code Enforcement Department
4. In 2012, bottles of red gold began exploding in a New
Jersey warehouse. Turns out the culprits purchased regular
Heinz, then re-bottled it fraudulently as the premium
fructose-less Simply Heinz Ketchup for a 12.5% profit!
Unfortunately, their plan was foiled by the fermentation
of the sugars, which, when combined with heat, combusted
and left them red-handed.
5.
"Heinz: it's automatic!"
Wendy
Williams Show
6. Proving ketchup goes well on everything (including
calves), Twilight star Jackson Rathbone scarred himself
for life with this gigantic Heinz tattoo.
Flickr/stevendepolo
7. Malcolm Gladwell's excellent 2004 New
Yorker article notes that Heinz effectively
dominated the ketchup market by focusing on all five of
the condiment's flavor attributes. Previously just a salty
and bitter sauce, Heinz increased umami with a thicker
consistency of ripe tomatoes, upped the sourness with
acidity from concentrated vinegar, and used benzoate preservatives
to double the sweetness, thus making consumers powerless
to resist the five-flavor assault.
Flickr/the_ewan
8. You might imagine Heinz buys a ton of tomatoes every
year, but that's not accurate. They buy two million tons
of tomatoes every year.
Flickr/Tim
Evanson
9. The main ketchup plant (like factory, not tomato) is
in Fremont, Ohio, whose most famous native son is Everton
Conger, known for ketching Lincoln assassin John Wilkes
Booth.
Wikipedia/Jorre
10. Coal tar was originally used as dye to give Heinz
its red color.
Wikipedia/Kwantonge
11. Today's ketchup is a much-removed ancestor of Asian
ke-tchup, which was a fish sauce made of fermented intestines,
stomach, and bladder.
Flickr/overthinkingme
12. The speed at which ketchup pours from a glass bottle
is 0.0450km/hour, which is also the approximate speed
of a garden snail.
Joey
Gannon/Wikipedia
13. Heinz Field is home to the Pittsburgh Steelers and
the Pitt Panthers. To honor Pittsburgh's metalworkers,
the facility features 12,000 tons of steel in the design.
To honor the locally based Heinz company, they serve a
whole lot of ketchup.
Blippar
14. Heinz is leaving all other ketchup brands in the dust
(they'll never catch up!) by pioneering an augmented reality
technology called Blippar, which allows them to deliver
recipe tips via smartphone.
Frugal
Cafe Blog Zone
15. Heinz sold more than 57 varieties of products when
it first branded itself. The number was chosen because
the founder considered it lucky, and because he just never
gave himself enough credit.
Wikipedia
and John Heinz Legacy
16. The heirs of the Heinz fortune often cross over into
politics, with John Heinz serving as the Republican senator
of Pennsylvania and Teresa Heinz serving as John Kerry's
wife.
For
the Original Article, Click
here
By
Dan Gentile, courtesy of thrillist.com
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