News

Jun 05, 2024

This Heinz Label Is Brilliantly Designed to Call Out Imposters

Customers can now tell if restaurants have made the "ole switcheroo." Heinz/Allrecipes Ketchup has a long history. It wasn’t always made from tomatoes. Its roots can be traced back about 2,000 years

Customers can now tell if restaurants have made the "ole switcheroo."

Heinz/Allrecipes

Ketchup has a long history. It wasn’t always made from tomatoes. Its roots can be traced back about 2,000 years ago to a southern Chinese fish sauce called ge-thcup or koe-cheup. From there, it evolved into a paste made from all sorts of foods, more akin to the generic term dip, but usually spicy, salty, and fermented.

Eventually, tomato ketchup came to be what we know it as today. Henry Heinz created a recipe of ripe tomatoes, distilled vinegar, brown sugar, salt, and spices, and put it into clear glass bottles so the public knew exactly what was behind the packaging.

Heinz may be the original brand of what we now know as ketchup, but there are many other generic and name brands of the French fry’s best friend. Now some Heinz bottles are sporting new labels that let people know exactly what brand is in there. If a restaurant tries to put anything but authentic Heinz ketchup in the bottle, the label will reveal the fraudulent ketchup.

Restaurants have been known to buy Heinz bottles and then refill those bottles with ketchup from another brand. Until now, unless someone can precisely taste the difference between Heinz and other ketchup brands, they’d have a hard time knowing the establishment pulled the old switcheroo.

If you have a bottle of Heinz ketchup in your fridge (which, by the way, is where Heinz says you should be storing an open bottle), take a look at it. Heinz’s distinctively shaped label has a white edge—for now. In Turkey, Heinz worked with the advertising firm Wunderman Thompson to create a label that would allow consumers to know if the ketchup in their Heinz bottles on restaurant tables is the real deal. The firm accomplished its mission to “stop ketchup fraud in its tracks” by turning that white edge on the label to Heinz ketchup red.

Working with Pantone, the company that identifies specific universal colors, Wunderman Thompson matched the ketchup color with its exact Pantone hue and turned the edge of the label into that specific red. Now, if a competitor’s ketchup is put into the Heinz bottle, the ketchup won’t match the edge of the label. Brilliant, simple, and so effective.

For now, it seems the tell-all labels are only in Turkey, but since restaurants around the world refill ketchup bottles, you may soon find red-edged Heinz bottles on a table near you.

Wunderman Thompson