When Every Ketchup But One Went ExtinctWhen Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct

The main casualty of the catsup war was flavor.

AROUND 1900, G.F. Mason, manager of the H.J. Heinz Company’s research laboratory, conducted a series of experiments on ketchup. He tinkered with sugar, vinegar, and spices in search of his equivalent of the four-minute mile: a shelf-stable, chemical preservative-free ketchup. Each of his carefully bottled, preservative-free samples kept for about 60 hours until, one by one, the corks popped out and the contents spoiled. Still, Mason was on the verge of a breakthrough: a ketchup that—after achieving victory in an all-out catsup war—would come to dominate America’s taste buds, leaving a wasteland of forgotten ketchup flavors in its wake.

“There were tremendously different ways of producing ketchup historically,” says Andrew Smith, a leading historian of American ketchup and author of Pure Ketchup: A History of America’s National Condiment. “So I suspect that the flavors were widely different from sour to sweet, and [thick to] relatively soft.”

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