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A Neat Way to Find the Faker at Your Dinner Table

Imagine the following: You and your family are out to dinner at a restaurant — not a big chain, but one locally-owned one that’s known for their burgers and fries. When you sit down, your table already has a pair of salt and pepper shakers at the ready, as well as a mostly full jar of Heinz ketchup.

You can be reasonably sure that the stuff in the salt shaker is, indeed, salt. Same goes for pepper and the pepper shaker. But while you’re probably safe to assume that the stuff in the bottle of Heinz is ketchup, it could be any brand of ketchup — and, in fact, there’s a pretty high chance it’s not Heinz at all. After all, Heinz is a well-known name brand; it’s cheaper for the restaurateur to fill that bottle with something else. How would the customer even notice?

For most people this wouldn’t be a problem — our palates aren’t sophisticated enough to tell one brand of ketchup apart from another. But for Heinz, this had the potential to be a big deal. First, you don’t want someone passing off a substandard product under your label; if a customer has a bad experience with the restaurant’s ketchup, they’re likely to blame Heinz, and possibly stop purchasing it at the grocery store. And second, Heinz wants the money from the restaurants; if the restaurateur is claiming that the ketchup on the table is indeed Heinz, shouldn’t Heinz be paid for that?

So in 2003, Heinz’s ad agency in Turkey decided to tackle the problem. They came up with an idea: a simple way for consumers to tell if their restaurants were lying to them. Match the color, as seen below.

Heinz, as a brand, is particularly proud of the bright red color of its product; it turns out that most other ketchups are a lot less red and a lot less brown. So VML, its ad agency, used that red as an indicator of “actual Heinzness,” which, to be clear, is a phrase I just made up. Here’s how VML described it: “To call out imposters, VML came up with a clever solution for customers to check they’re being served authentic Heinz Ketchup. Identifying the exact shade of Pantone Red that’s unmistakably Heinz, we added it to the label and launched an Instagram filter for verification – so if the label doesn’t match the sauce in the bottle, it's not original Heinz.”

But of course, not everyone is going to think to Instagram their ketchup — that’s an odd thing to do, right? So another Heinz agency made it even easier: they made it so you could color match without needing your phone at all. If you look carefully at the bottom of any of the three Heinz labels depicted above, you’ll see that it reads “Is that Heinz? Check with the color on the label,” with arrows pointing toward the product behind the transparent bottle. As Yahoo Life explained, “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.” As the 64-second promo video for the campaign noted, “if the colors match, it’s Heinz,” but “if the colors don’t match, it’s not Heinz.”

The impact of the anti-fraud labels is hard to gauge, in no small part because, as of this writing, the labels were only on products distributed to restaurants in Turkey.

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More About Ketchup

Today’s Bonus fact: In June 2013, Heinz hired Bernardo Hees, a longstanding corporate leader, as its new CEO. In response, fast food giant McDonald’s announced that it would no longer be serving Heinz ketchup, despite a 40-year history of featuring the famous ketchup in many of its stores around the world (although not in most of its American locations.) Hees wasn’t a controversial hire and he hadn’t done anything illegal or unethical. The issue for McDonald’s was Hees’ resume. As FoodOnline reported, Hees was “the former head of Burger King” who “gave the struggling fast food chain the lift it needed to recreate itself as the worthy rival of McDonald’s,” and had remained the vice chair of Burger King’s board.

From the Archives: The Tiny Lie in Your Pantry: Heinz famously comes in 57 varieties… right? RIGHT?!?

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And thanks! — Dan