[steveBK123]

Not sure about using Heinz ketchup as an example. To me there are cheap ketchups that taste worse, and fancy yuppie ketchups that taste different for 2-5x the price, but nothing really tastes genuinely better.

Ketchup is like a staple unobjectionable thing to stock in the fridge for kids/guests/comfort. Stocking a weird one kind of defeats the purpose.

I'd rather try various steak / bbq / teriyaki / whatever sauces that set out to be categorically different.

[gullywhumper]

I haven't read this in a while, but remember this Malcom Gladwell article discussing why other ketchups haven't had much success:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-co...

[steveBK123]

Great snippet -

“The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”

[mkaic]

Here's an unpaywalled PDF I found of the same: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/gilden/files/2016/04/theketchupco...

[educasean]

Person endorsement for Sir Kensington's ketchup. I find it to be a noticeable improvement over Heinz.

[Spooky23]

Yes! Heinz is coke. Hunts is Pepsi. Everything else is usually lesser.

[steveBK123]

Yes for me theres a whole variety of low-brow staple packaged processed foods I think we've all sort of imprinted upon a certain flavor profile growing up.

I'd rather explore entirely other flavors/categories than spend 4x on some fancy knockoff to signal I'm low brow high end. Extremely diminishing returns, and mostly just tastes different.

I don't need a $4 replacement for a Coke or a $5 Mac-n-cheese or a $10 bottle of ketchup.

Honestly we should all be buying less of these processed foods, not going further upmarket with them.

[badc0ffee]

Don't forget French's (is it the RC Cola of ketchups?)

[Spooky23]

YES!

Citi Field used to serve French’s. Which is odd because they were doing Mike’s mustard… money talks I suppose.

My son who was little was like “dad, there’s something wrong with my hot dog.” I tried it, and yes, something was terribly wrong. That stuff tastes like they put tomato flavor in strawberry jam.

[steveBK123]

I never knew it and will immediately forget it lol