Heinz and the Fifty-Seven Varieties

Henry John Heinz started his food business in eighteen sixty-nine in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, a small town just northeast of Pittsburgh along the Allegheny River. His first product was prepared horseradish, packed in clear glass jars so buyers could see exactly what they were getting. Heinz had noticed that other horseradish sellers used dark bottles to hide fillers: sawdust, turnips, adulterants. Transparency was his brand before branding had a name.

The company went bankrupt in eighteen seventy-five, a common outcome in the volatile economy of the Gilded Age. Heinz reorganized under a new structure, with his brother and cousin, and one of the first products the new company made was Heinz Tomato Ketchup, introduced in eighteen seventy-six. It became one of the most successful condiments in American history.

In eighteen eighty-eight he bought out his partners and renamed the company H. J. Heinz. He moved the operation to Pittsburgh proper, eventually building a manufacturing complex in the Northside of the city that became one of the city's major industrial landmarks.

The Fifty-Seven Varieties slogan, which has been on Heinz packaging since eighteen ninety-six, is a piece of marketing mythology. Heinz saw a sign advertising twenty-one varieties of shoes and liked the number concept. He chose fifty-seven even though the company was already making more than sixty products, because five was his lucky number and seven was his wife's. The number is fictional. The ketchup is real.

Much of Heinz's old Northside manufacturing complex still stands, and part of it has been converted into the residential development called Heinz Lofts in the Troy Hill neighborhood. But every bottle of ketchup in every diner in America still says Pittsburgh on it, in a way.