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.
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.