Where Are Thou Ketchup?
Ketchup’s in trouble with people like me. In the past year, I’ve purchased Wasabi Sauce, Salsa, Thai Peanut Sauce, Thai Basil Sauce, Sweet and Spicy Thai Sauce (I have a thing for Thai) and MANY other condiments. I’m a condiment kind of guy.
But like nearly every year in the past four decades, I’ve purchased no ketchup.
Comparing supermarket sales, ketchup sold less than salsa twenty years ago.
The last great ketchup innovation was the Heinz upside down bottle, put out with a blaze of glory in 2003. That bottle increased ketchup sales for Heinz by 6 percent.
That a new bottle increased sales encapsulates ketchup’s problem. This bland sauce is a traditional favorite, the sauce’s blessing and its curse. The people who’ve moved on to other flavors aren’t coming back, and the people who haven’t embraced other food fads don’t want anything to change except the bottle.
This is not to say that the world doesn’t still like this sweet sauce. Ketchup sales are growing, but so are the sales of other condiments and the old traditional sauce just can’t keep pace.
Take a look at the average condiment aisle and ketchup is still there, but so are a lovely array of sauces, dressings, and condiments. They’ve come from Asia, the Middle East and wherever Sriracha was dreamed up. Compared to Ketchup they’re ablaze with flavor. And they have far more space in the supermarket aisle today than ever before.
In the store I shop in, ketchup has less space than both mayo and salsa, and that’s before the other more interesting condiments get thrown in.
Partially this is due to a changing
Another boring condiment, Mayonnaise, currently romps in the condiment wars. Mayo outpaces its nearest competitor, ketchup, by more than 2 to 1. Were it not for American’s burger obsession and the millions of meat bundles sold in drive-through grease factories, ketchup would be the MySpace to mayo’s Facebook.
The reason for mayo’s ascendency? Mayo’s like the greatest character actor ever, changing its tune in a bewildering variety of ways. You can put anything in mayo to give it some flavor and people seem to love it. How many times have you ordered some homemade chip, or a crab cake and been told it comes dressed up with some type of aioli sauce? Aioli’s basically mayo and spice.
Although seemingly counterintuitive for this bland condiment that makes ketchup seem to be bursting at the seams with flavor rushes, Mayo’s sales ascendency has come about because of the spicing up of the American palate.
Ketchup just doesn’t have that much plasticity. I know, let’s add some onions and garlic and pepper, oh yeah, that’s salsa!