Ketchup is a condiment that’s often taken for granted. But a peek behind the curtain at Kraft Heinz on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Heinz Tomato Ketchup reveals a commitment to sustainable farming, a passion for agriculture that starts with seed selection, an investment in master tomato growers and more.
Tomatoes for Heinz Ketchup are grown on nearly every continent, with some 200,000 acres cultivated in California alone. The company says it’s the world’s largest buyer of processing tomatoes as well as the world’s No. 1 processing tomato seed company.
On this scale, there’s more than a little science and complexity to making a consistent product around the globe.
To learn what’s behind the company’s “Grown Not Made” slogan for Heinz Ketchup, The Packer recently sat down with Patrick Sheridan, vice president of global agriculture at Kraft Heinz and Heinz Tomato Master Gerry Schamberger.
“’Grown Not Made’ started about 150 years ago — we’re going to celebrate the big anniversary next year for Heinz ketchup — and our founder really took it to the level of the ingredient,” says Sheridan, who leads all things agriculture at Kraft Heinz, including the company’s seed business. “The slogan says, ‘a great product needs great ingredients,’ meaning you have great farmers, great growers, with a great farming system that produces quality ingredients for the No. 1 ketchup in the world. And for us, tomatoes are one of our core ingredients.”
Sheridan says the company started breeding for Heinz tomatoes about 90 years ago to create “the perfect Heinz ketchup tomato” that delivers consistent quality — and it all starts with seeds.
“We have a very extensive process where we look at each and every potential candidate or seed variety and how it performs in the field, how it performs in the factory, how you could turn that tomato into ketchup,” he says. “We have what we call our pilot plant, where we test every new candidate in multiple stages of the development process. We test the existing varieties multiple times throughout the season for multiple growers.
“We’re looking to create a better experience for consumers, so we’re putting a lot of R&D effort into creating Heinz varieties that give us that consistent experience,” he continues.
Increasing weather challenges and an evolving disease spectrum means Heinz is continually trialing new varieties around the world.
“We are experiencing certain variations in the weather patterns and various geographies or growing regions,” Sheridan says. “As the environment in which the tomatoes need to grow and perform changes, we also need to change the varieties and make sure they are adapted to those growing conditions they encounter today.”
And the iconic red of a Heinz Ketchup bottle is not left to chance either.
“We are very, very proud of the color of our product, which is really 100% just from those tomatoes,” says Sheridan. “We never add any color of any shape or form to that signature red color. It’s just from those perfect Heinz tomatoes that we have developed.”
To ensure consistency of color regardless of where the tomatoes are grown around the globe, Heinz has a special color tile against which all suppliers check the color of the ketchup.
“Every supplier that we work with always checks against that tile to make sure that that color is perfect and on spec,” he says.
Wait for It
Anyone who’s ever tapped the bottom of a Heinz ketchup bottle to coax the condiment onto a burger or basket of fries has actually experienced a precisely calculated quality that Kraft Heinz says sets its ketchup apart.
“We’ve developed our own proprietary measuring tool that measures how fast that ketchup flows, so the consumer has that perfect experience — that signature Heinz ketchup viscosity or thickness — when you put it on your plate,” Sheridan says.
Called the “Heinz quantifier,” Schamberger says the tool was developed many decades ago for Heinz ketchup.
“Specifically, it is to give an indication of how fast the ketchup comes out of the bottle,” Schamberger says. “Obviously we want a nice, slow ketchup. I think it was calculated to be .028 miles per hour. So, we’re talking about the speed of a snail.”
The optimal Heinz tomato satisfies what Schamberger says are the two biggest factors important to consumers: consistency of the viscosity and color.
“Consumers want a deep red color that indicates the product is a high quality,” he says.
Sheridan says consumers want the ketchup to retain its shape but not be too solid.
“When you stick your fries into that ketchup, you want it to run down just a little bit on your fry before you stick it in your mouth,” he says. “And that is why we need that meter to give you that [optimal] flow.
“And we deliver this design consistently across the world for every single serving,” he adds. “That is so amazing, because [our tomatoes are] 100% natural — the color, the viscosity. I find this mind-blowing that we work with Mother Nature and every grower delivers the same product every single time.”
Sustainability for the Grower
Sustainability is another key theme at Kraft Heinz, where Sheridan says he’s on a mission to make the company’s ingredient supply chain more productive and sustainable.
“For us, sustainability starts with great farming and the great growers we support. Across many geographies, we have teams on the ground that work with our growers to help them become more productive growers and better growers,” Sheridan says. “So, when we show up, we don’t lead with sustainability. For us, sustainability is a consequence. It’s the result. We lead with the grower. We lead with what can we do to help the grower perform better.”
Sheridan says sustainability is about more than environmental sustainability, it’s also the viability of the farming operation from an economic perspective.
“Growers need to make money so that they can invest in the land, and they can invest in the farming system and make that more productive and more sustainable,” he says.
Sheridan says listening to growers, understanding their unique challenges and then bringing the company’s decades of research and understanding of agriculture systems to boost soil health are also key to its sustainability efforts.
“We have hard evidence that shows if you increase your soil health, you increase your productivity, you improve your farm performance, and as a result, you also improve the sustainability performance,” he says. “The great tomatoes we get, the reliable supply chains that we’ve built, are really grounded in the soil and in this this approach of working with the growers as partners.”
