When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct

G.F.Mason was the manager of the H.J. Heinz Company's research laboratory. He searched for his equivalent of the four-minute mile: a shelf-stable, chemical preservative-free, homemade tomato sauce. The samples were kept for about 60 hours until the corks popped out and the contents spoiled. After achieving victory in an all-out catsup war, Mason was on the verge of a breakthrough that would leave a wasteland of forgotten condiments in its wake.

Andrew Smith is the author of Pure Ketchup: A History of America's National Condiment. I think the flavors were different from sour to sweet.

Americans used to make tomato ketchup from many home recipes. The first recorded recipe for a home-fermented tomato catsup was published in 1810, a descendant of British imitations of Asian "cat-sup." Tomato catsup, which cooks with ingredients such as apples and anchovy in addition to tomatoes, caught on quickly due to its bright flavor, which livened up an otherwise boring American diet. It had a shelf life of around seven years.

Companies mass produced, bottled, and sold to a new class of urban consumers after the Civil War. There was a thinner, less sweet, and more tomato-y version of this sauce. It was a liability for manufacturers when it came to fermentation. Ketchup became sour as Americans switched to sugar at the end of the century.

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Sometimes bottles of ketchup would explode. The New York Sun reported in 1895 that a bottle of catsup exploded on the dinner table of a family at Michigan City, Indiana. There was a 1903 headline in the Saint Paul Globe about a twelve year old girl who was cut by flying glass.

Ketchup companies wanted to protect their customers. According to Smith, studies in California, Connecticut, and Kentucky found that the majority of commercial Ketchup samples had some form of antiseptic.

The man who became chief of the Division of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture was a man raised evangelical in Indiana. After earning chemistry and medical degrees, he shifted the focus of the Division of Chemistry to food safety issues.

He proposed many food safety bills that were killed. A group of healthy, young, male volunteers, mostly his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture, were enlisted to eat all of their meals at work and ingest large amounts of preservatives in 1904. The results read like the last 10 seconds of a drug commercial, with nausea, headaches, dizziness, and loss of appetite. The trials were stopped when participants became sick. The poison squad was sensationalized in the press.

In 1907, at a meeting of the U.S. regional canners associations, Wiley called for a ban on the use of benzoates, thePreservative of Choice for the Ketchup Industry. Even though executives were not convinced, they couldn't come up with an alternative to prevent the bottles from exploding.

The H.J. Heinz Company was owned by Henry Heinz. By the age of 52, he had founded a firm with offices in London, Australia, andBermuda. Smith writes in Pure Ketchup that he became the largest tomato-ketchup producer in the world when he removed the preservatives from his product.

According to Robert C. Alberts, who wrote a biography of Heinz, the food-regulations movement was supported by the man because of his ideals and noble purpose. Regulations would help the company command high prices and maintain its reputation because they were at the forefront of food hygiene.

There was a recipe for a benzoate-free Ketchup by 1906. American cooks have figured out another way to stop the growth of yeast, which is by boiling ripe tomatoes, adding lots of vinegar, and making sure they are sterile. Smith writes that their earlier Ketchup was medium-bodied and acidic. 12 million bottles of shelf-stable, preservative-free ketchup were produced in the next two years after they replaced this with a full body from perfectly ripe, carefully cooked tomatoes. A few years later, after a woman in Pennsylvania sent a dozen bottles of her homemade, tastier, better-looking, benzoate-free ketchup, they adopted her recipe.

Thanks in part to high-quality ingredients, the new tomato Ketchup from Heinz costs three times more than its competitors. The industry had never seen an advertising campaign like this one. Heinz told grocers to get rid of any preserved foods before they were taken away by the government. There was a two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post that warned. According to the U.S. Gov., the ingestion of soda in food can cause injury to Digestion and Health.

The pro-benzoate lobby was formed by a group of Ketchup Companies. They argued that an anti-benzoate law would kill the industry. The lobby of American grocery stores said that it was impossible for a company to claim that their product was shelf stable. According to Smith, an industry journal reported that a priest struck his head against the door because of an explosion caused by the lack of preservatives.

In 1907, the chemists Arvil and Bitting were hired by WILEY to make a new type of sauce withoutPreservatives. Since homemade Ketchup had a longer shelf life than manufactured bottles, the Bittings studied recipes from books, magazines, and journals, and found that homemade Ketchup contained more ingredients than the 1,600 commercial bottles they analyzed. They decided that if it was boiled until it was thick enough to be canned and handled in a sanitary way, it could keep indefinitely.

The Bittings were cited in his ads as he continued his full court press on consumers. The lobby fought hard for it's existence. At one point, industry journals called for his firing after they published unconfirmed reports that he got into a fight with another person at a hotel after being served a chemically preserved tomato sauce. Roosevelt supported him.

He had won the fight. His expensive, thick, sugar-laden, vinegary Ketchup dominated the market. Heinz was at the right place at the right time and with the right product. If you want to be safe, and if you want to have a good meal, you go for food that's been tested to be safe.

In 1908, a board of scientists created by President Roosevelt ruled that bicyle of soda was not harmful if it was consumed in quantities of less than half a gram a day. The campaign on public opinion continued, and Americans did not like the idea of Preservatives. Most major companies stopped using them by 1915, and those that didn't lost a lot of customers. In the 1900s, hot dogs, hamburgers, and french fries were some of the most popular food items in the country.

At the time, the victory secured the use of higher quality ingredients for Americans. Poor Sanitation and low quality tomatoes were hidden by many companies. Ketchup was often made from leftover tomato trimmings that were poorly stored and then bottled with a heavy dose of benzoate, which covered up factories' shoddy sanitization practices. Smith wrote that this had allowed companies to sell at a lower price but at a cost to consumer safety. As time went on, food inspectors were better able to detect low-quality or contaminated Ketchup, leading to more companies dropping them.

Smith claims that the triumph came at a price, and that it was a mass extinction event for the once diverse array of condiments. The condiments were overwhelmed by the heavy boiling and sugar used to make them. Blue Label Ketchup said that they would have to cook the tomato flavor out of their sauce if they didn't have bicyle. Smith cites testimony from a maker of Ketchup that it had a better flavor than other brands. Craft-ketchup makers are experimenting with the tomato taste of the sauce. Sir Kensington's sells a chunkier version of the popular Ketchup that has more of a tomato taste. The pop-up America Eats Tavern was a place where Chef Jose Andrés made 1800s recipes from old books. The company claims to revive a recipe from the 19th century. I tried to get a bottle, but they only sell it in the West Coast and Texas, and Amazon sold out. I will just have to make catsup at home.

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