It reaches a point where it has economy of scale and specific taste profile developed that it is very hard for others to break into the market. Similar to bake beans for those living in UK.
The cost of ingredient is so low in the overall of things, restaurants, owner, vendors or whatever are not willing to switch ingredients and risk losing their customers. Tabasco is similar because majority of their business actually resides in Food Services sector and not consumers. The basic rule of thumb in Food offering, dont FUCK with your recipes.
I remember when I was still in the Food sector I was trying to import and distribute Sriracha for years in the late 00s and very early 10s. Every time the answer has been not enough capacity. Demand outstripping Supply in most of their important / domestic ( US ) market. Importers have to rely on non-official parallel import channels. Somehow I think it went internet viral by mid 10s, which in turns generate further interest. And a whole positive feedback loop was formed. Worth noting is that these things takes a long time to make. I dont know about Sriracha but Tabasco takes up to three years. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies ( and assuming yields are good ), that is why supply takes time to catch up.
Unfortunately these type of investment takes a very long time and are not something VC likes to invest in. But for me they are sometimes far more interesting and fascinating than most tech.
1) When ketchup is called for, there isn't a substitute condiment that's kind of similar. Sriracha in general is a subset of hot sauces, but nobody thinks of a general case for ketchup--it's just ketchup. Maybe there are situations where no hot sauce but sriracha will do, but that's much rarer in the US (where Huy Fong dominates the market).
2) There are no Fancy Dijon Ketchups. The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better; Heinz is as good as it gets. It's Andy Warhol's old observation that the President drinks the same Coke that you do, only more so--there are way more niche colas than niche ketchups.
0: https://hungarianmeatmarket.com/product/univer-ketchup/
1: https://www.google.com/search?q=dutch+catsup&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF...
2: https://www.delmonte.com/products/tomatoes/condiments/ketchu...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/french-s-heinz-ketchup-leam...
https://meny.no/varer/middagstilbehor/ketchup-og-sennep/ketc...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hela_Gew%C3%BCrzwerk_Hermann_L... which I prefer over any Heinz(I have tried so far). Though I have not much use for Ketchup, so can't tell with certainty.
We did have a Heinz SA, but they are failing and will be discontinued. I'm guessing that all the locals stuck to their preferred brands and no one else made enough of an inroad.
I've seen plenty of brands in specialty markets that are more expensive than Heinz for that reason.
I'm curious how trends will go in the future -- maybe next year will be all about artisanal small-batch ketchups, who knows -- but it wouldn't surprise me if ~everyone who likes ketchup on things is perfectly happy with Heinz 57 and ~most people who want something else for their burgers, fries or steaks want something different. BBQ sauce, mayo, mustard, sriracha, guac, mole... and not just "ketchup, but better".
Like, imagine your friend excitedly dragging you to a new restaurant, where they serve their house-made fries with ________. The world of things that can go in that blank is so large I have a hard time imagining "artisanal ketchup" being the thing that wins out.
1. It’s widespread (not even artisanal) in the regions it is deployed in. I can walk into my neighborhood grocery store in Texas and always expect to see Whataburger Spicy Ketchup in the condiment aisle.
2. The spicy ketchup is a genuinely superior product to Heinz. It just straight up tastes better, feels less sugary, and it’s far enough ahead in quality that I actively seek it out over “regular” ketchup.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/we-do-our-own-li...
Yeah, there are. Lots, actually.
> The food snobs don't have an artisan brand they like better
Sure, they do (lots of them—as with mustards contrasted with basic French’s yellow, plenty of different styles—for different foodies, some that are refinements of the mass market style, e.g., Annie’s Organics entry, but lots that go with more distinct flavor, especially spice, profiles; Maya Kaimal Spicy Ketchup would be an example in this category.) What there might not be is a Grey Poupon equivalent, a succesfully mass-marketed mass-appeal entry brand to the not-the-basic-thing segment.
Heinz has had decades and armies of food scientists and tasters to dial in their recipe. The only way to compete with that is to make a ketchup that is less appealing to the average person but more appealing to some niche subset of people (e.g. crank up or down the acidity or sweetness).
You sound like it's some kind of bizzarre weird strategy that only few insane weirdos would try. As in fact that's how most of the food brands (by number, not by volume) would work - find your niche and serve it. And not only food, of course. Some produce average food for "average person", some produce excellent food for people that value it. That's how it has always been.
For instance, pretty much anybody will prefer high quality ice cream to basic ice cream, but the reason that basic ice cream still exists is because the fancy stuff costs 5x more.
The problem with making a "fancy" ketchup is that ketchup is a completely artificial food. The quality of a ketchup is in how balanced it is. And balancing a ketchup is a fixed cost not a marginal cost. Whoever makes the most revenue will have the best ketchup.
Finding a working ketchup formula may be not easy. But you have to do it once. Then that's it, you can sell it forever. And it doesn't take that much. As well as it doesn't take it that much to not just stuff tomato paste with as much sugar as chemistry would allow and call it "ketchup". And yet, mass brands to that and a lot of people happily buy it.
Better stuff may cost more, because of smaller volumes and better quality controls, but not 5x. At least not all of them. I just checked the list of ketchups in Whole Foods. Heintz is 17c per ounce. 365 brand is 8.7c/oz. Others range from 18c to 73c, pretty much equally distributed. Yes, there's one 5x brand - but that's one, out of a dozen. And that's just one store, I'm sure there are more brands which will occupy the whole gamut from 1x to 10x (I am sure somebody somewhere sells a ketchup for more than a dollar per oz, even if I haven't seen one).
Tastes really aren't universal and, more than that, have a certain average (though there is large individual variation) contribution from familiarity and other path-dependent effects.
Do average people eat average food because of average income, or average tastes, of average tastes due to average income? Each is part of the story (and how much of a part each is varies from person to person and category of food.)
To your taste, sure. For lots of people, the same thing is true of dijon (and other not-French’s-yellow) mustard.
OTOH, plenty of people disagree with you on that, which is why there are established, succesful—if individually mostly niche—alternatives.
> Heinz has had decades and armies of food scientists and tasters to dial in their recipe.
So did French’s. The hard part of getting broad reach on alternatives isn’t making some alternative that enough people will like if they try, but getting enough people over the activation energy threshold to try. Grey Poupon’s breakout marketing campaign in the 80s did that for mustard; there hasn't been an equivalent for ketchup.
And, sure, that probably doesn’t unseat the dominant player, but that’s not what thr uothread discussion of “dijon” alternatives was about.
Sure there are. There's lots of alternative ketchups both on the health scale (less or no high fructose corn syrup) and taste scale (spicier, smokier, you name it).
I use ketchup semi-regularly but haven't bought the Heinz type in ages (primarily to avoid so much fructose, but it's also fun to experiment with the different flavors).
Even Heinz offers its own organic variant [2], but IIRC it’s not particularly different from the regular.
Finally, the category also includes tomato “jam” (and some might include tomato chutney), tomato-based BBQ sauces, and even tomato-based salsa (commonly used for egg dishes in place of ketchup).
Heinz is a 'default' - and absence of it used to indicate the replacement was worse. Now - plenty of better options, just maybe without the brand recognition.
Heinz is a good baseline - you know what you're getting.
Whole Foods has over 10 brands of ketchup: https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/search?text=ketchup including their own "365" label. It suggests to me if everybody were buying Heinz, they probably wouldn't bother doing their private label?
In Quebec there is a pretty proud history of a much different style of ketchup, which is much sweeter with bigger chunks of tomatoes.
It's not uncommon to see traditional-style ketchup options in restaurants and at grocery stores.
I'm not convinced that's the case. I mean, yeah, I buy Heinz to go with fries or on my beyond burger, but for a brief time I made my own ketchup using a very simple recipe I found on a youtube channel but substituting my own spice blend and it was amazing. In the end though my palette is not very picky and my inherent laziness won out.
So since I know ketchup can be better than Heinz, I have to expect that there is in fact a fancy branded ketchup out there that is.
There are many cases where sriracha not not general hot sauce would work such as dim sum and pho.
And before you counter with "in the US", I'd argue that Huy Fong is much more dominant in California than in the US at large and in California, cuisines where only sriracha type hot sauce and not just any general hot sauce works are much more common.
Personally, I like Red Gold on fries more than Heinz. Couldn't explain why very easily as I'm not one to use food terms. Maybe a bit more acidic?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...
Really? I'd say it's nr 2 after Felix.
Queue meeting my now asian wife whose family uses Sriracha in near about everything and it has basically replaced ketchup.
Matter of fact they use it so much it changed MY spice tolerance such that we now have Sriracha Ketchup instead of Heinz. We even went the extra bit and replaced American Mayo with Kewpie mayo.
American condiments can stand to learn from global condiments...
Cue meeting. We have to trie to do better.
Watch out for a heap of downvotes.
wow, what was she before she was asian? (i kid!)
i like sriracha, but i don't really get the craze, personally preferring sambal oelek (garlic chili sauce) and tapatio more.
What was she before she turned Asian?
There's no such thing as American condiments, unless you pretend the US is homogeneous (which it isn't remotely close to being). Maybe you kinda sorta could have pigeonholed the US like that 40-50 years ago. I don't think it's possible to label-standardize as it pertains to food in the US any longer (as though there's American food at this point), given the diversity in the US now and the large variance between regions, states, cities.
The US is (sadly) extremely homogeneous because it's the same few dozen brands that are ever-present everywhere. You can be air-dropped blindfolded into a strip mall anywhere in the country and there will be no way to tell where you are since it'll be the exact same chain-food.
> Maybe you kinda sorta could have pigeonholed the US like that 40-50 years ago.
Strange comment because 40-50 years ago it was quite the opposite. A few nationwide-chains existed already, but every town had a local flavor and nearly all restaurants were local. It was fun to travel town to town experiencing the differences. Today it's the same everywhere. Very dull.
Certainly, we have access to the same stuff, and many of us enjoy similar food, but I mean, Californians put avocado on everything, and you're not going to get Gumbo in Seattle.
America has a national food culture that kind of exists on top of the local one.
However, most Americans do not cook the way fast food restaurants produce food. Also, chains differ. For example, in the south, there are often different proportions of chains. Most people eat their local diet.
I notice it all the time. Contrary to popular belief, these 'ethnic' places are not expensive or fancy. When I lived in California, I often ate at cheapo Mexican restaurants and cheap asian ones. Now that I live in Oregon, I often find myself at cheapo pub fare type places or food trucks serving Lebanese food.
Cuisines change a lot across the country. The fast food system is a homogeneous layer superimposed on top of that. Most people do not eat that everyday.
And Heinz has a Sriracha Ketchup.
>. Once you factor in capacity planning and sourcing of quality chillies
I believe Huy Fong (as of 2016) and Tobasco (As of much earlier) run their own pepper farms. Tobasco takes those three years to age in vinegar. Siratcha does not have an aging process I am aware of, it goes straight through the commercial kitchen and into bottles.
[1]: https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/arnotts-sha...
I didn’t realize it take up to 3 years to make the sauce. It’s because they need to ferment some of the stuff?
Sriracha does seem to be northern California's version of ketchup - it is ubiquitous in restaurants. You can even get it at Starbucks, though I've never seen anyone add it to hot drinks.
I've seen it a lot in southern California as well, although various Mexican hot sauces are also popular, as is Tabasco.
The Tabasco story is really interesting and it's essentially the Sriracha of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tabasco is a private, family-owned company. They still grow all the seeds for its pepper crops on the same island they did in the 1800s [1]. Some family members were friends with Teddy Roosevelt [2]. I remember hearing, but cannot find a source right now, that Roosevelt like the sauce so much he had it included in military ration kits.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tabasco-hot-sauce-industry-60-m... [2] https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Blog/Item/John%20Ave...
It remains a differentiated product based on its core feature, taste.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sriraja-Panich-Sriracha-Chili-Sauce/d...
I might give Bachan's a try!
[0] https://importfood.com/products/thai-sauces-condiments/item/...
Maybe a bit different than Huy Fong, but it checks the box for me.
Side note, the main mechanism TJs and other store brands use to pull off this trick is to have the original manufacturers produce the product for them as a white label product.
I've got two different blends of Sriracha sauce in my cupboard, both from Thai companies and one of them even copying Tran's bottle style, but it wouldn't have occurred to me until reading this article that a particular Vietnamese-American brand was supposed to be the "authentic" one. He could have got the origin story out there to people who don't watch documentaries about hot sauce if he'd spent money on advertising though...
And what more would I possibly want from their product? It is a good product at a reasonable price. People are going to go with what they like.
All you have to do at this point is not mess that up. Don’t try to increase profit margins by raising prices or changing the formula. And don’t do anything that is going to lower brand recognition.
The biggest risk to Heinz ketchup, for example, is their premium price. Restaurant owners often go with a different ketchup because Heinz costs significantly more. Obviously Kraft-Heinz has determined that they can make more money this way and since they have strong brand recognition it probably won’t harm them.
If a company tried to sell a more expensive premium product in flashier packaging - then it would feel inauthentic. What are you paying more for?
Valentina black label is better for some things, though. It's not marketed as a sriracha sauce, just a Mexican hot sauce.
Aside, but if you ever find yourself in or near southern Louisiana, the Tabasco headquarters at Avery Island is actually a pretty fun outing. Lots of tasting (pre covid anyway), a self-guided factory tour, and some cool nature.
My grocery store has a half dozen Sriracha sauces. Some I like less, some I like more. They’re all pretty different in flavor.
If a company tries to sell a cheaper version - then it feels like a cheap knock-off. And as everybody can afford to buy the original, why wouldn't you?
If a company tried to sell a more expensive premium product in flashier packaging - then it would feel inauthentic. What are you paying more for?
Plus whilst they've not paid for advertising, they've performed an excellent job of ensuring I'm aware of their history. I've no idea of the history of say Tabasco or Franks - but I've many times heard the history of this plucky little immigrant founded company (and this thread is just a continuation). Maybe the key is to just have a likable story - and let others tell it.