Kennywood decides to return to Heinz Ketchup

I don't care about Ketchup at all but I just shook my head when I heard about this.

RME...

Not me. I totally get it.

Pittsburghians love their Heinz. They are very opinionated about it. I think it's too expensive. It's good, but French's makes ketchup of equal quality and taste, in my opinion, and it's almost half the price.

Hunts is just garbage though.

And along with that comes mustard, mayo, pickles, and gravy for Potato Patch. I’d assume.

Mustard was always Heinz, Hunt's only got the ketchup deal. Ken's has all the other condiments... ranch, honey mustard, bbq, etc.

LostKause said:

I think it's too expensive.

I was today years old when I first heard someone refer to ketchup as expensive.

Fair. Thanks for pointing that out. I mean, compared to other Ketchup. Of course, a four dollar bottle of Ketchup is not really "expensive."

I bough a bottle of Ketchup at Aldi a few days ago and it was about a dollar. I haven't tried it to see if it's any good yet, but I haven't bought anything at Aldi yet that I didn't like.

Heinz ketchup is Like $7 for 3 big bottles at Sam's.

Since my kids are older and/or not at home, we hardly use ketchup and don't use it fast enough. We tend to hit the date before all three bottles are gone.

(*Was going to hit "submit" but figured I'd go look it up rather than coming back and adding the edit. It's $7.68 for three 44oz bottles. Less than 6 cents an ounce.)

I've generally found that all ketchup tastes pretty much the same. We don't use a lot and I tend to go with the store brand when we buy it. The only ketchup I've had that I didn't like was an organic store brand from Whole Foods and my wife only bought that because it was the most convenient store to get to.

There's definitely a difference. In fact Heinz in Canada is vastly superior to what's sold in the US. I have no idea what the recipe difference is.

I buy the "Simply Heinz" ketchup, it supposed to be the original recipe with no additives and with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup for sweetener.

Well, that's interesting because the link above to the Sam's listing for the three bottles specifically says:

"No high fructose corn syrup"

So, is the "no HFCS" thing simply a marketing line for the Simply Heinz line? Like, of course it doesn't have HFCS, regular heinz doesn't either.

(Also, I understand there's other additives and/or GMO stuff, but the "no HFCS" seem to be a redundancy.)

(Also also, why am I putting so much thought into a product I barely use.)

(Also also also, Heinz is far and away the best and the difference is totally noticable.)

I used to buy Simply Heinz all the time because of it having no HFCS. IIRC, regular Heinz used to have HFCS. The "Simply" variety was created to compete with another brand that marketed thier Ketchup as having no HFCS like the "national leading brand" had. ...Or something like that.

Recently, over the last few years, Heinz started making mustard, so French's retaliated by making Ketchup, IIRC.

The Ketchup industry is highly competitive, apparently. LOL

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story called "Unpaid Consultant". It is about the ketchup industry (in a way). You don't want to get involved in an argument about thixotropy, that's for sure.

The weirdest topics still draw the most discussion around here, even after 20 years.

I don't have a particularly strong opinion on ketchup, but I'm pretty sure normal Heinz has HFCS. My daughter has a pretty bad reaction to it so we read labels very carefully and I was under the impression that regular Heinz has it and Simply Heinz doesn't.

Correct. Normal Heinz. Simply Heinz.

Buried deep in the article is also a single mention that Heinz will be returning to Sandcastle and Idlewild as well.

This incident illustrates the difficulties businesses have when making decisions at the corporate level without accounting for local markets. Heinz is originally from Pittsburgh and is still a big name here -- just look at Heinz Field and Heinz History Center. For another major institution in this city to try to switch from Heinz was only going to end one way.

(I also agree that Heinz is the best ketchup for those rare times I use ketchup.)