Products that failed in the market - Heinz | Heinz colored ketchup

I am Kiron Kasbekar, and the video I’ve created for you today is the first of a series about products that failed in the marketplace. 

Now failure is inevitable in a market that is bustling with activity, where new technologies and new fashions are born so frequently that we lose track of them, and forget all about the old ones that failed, or were withdrawn for other reasons. 

In today’s marketplace, you stroll down a supermarket aisle and find something new. But that new product is often an old product in a new packaging. 

Continual experimentation happens in an effort to tear through the pall of boredom that marketers say descends on older brands. Most of that experimentation is confined to packaging changes, with some pitiful change being made to sound dramatic by adding adjectives like ‘New’, ‘Super’, ‘Extra-strong’, ‘Extra-power’, ‘Powered by X’, ‘Powered by Y’, ‘Extra zing’, and so on. 

If they’ve played this trick too many times already and know that buyers won’t go for that new ingredient – like salt or clove oil in your toothpaste, or lemon oil in your soap – because buyers see all such things simply as snake oil, then they resort to that age-old trick. 

They add ‘10 per cent extra FREE!’

I mean, when did any company give you anything really free? 

But, once in a while, companies do launch something different. Sometimes very different. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it bombs. 

In today’s video and in a few more videos after that, I am going to talk about new products that failed. 

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OK. Back to today’s video. I hope you watch it completely. Now let me get back to it.

This is going to be a series on product failures. 

Given the time constraints of videos on this channel, I will cover only a few of them at a time. Or just one at a time. 

And today I am going to talk about just one spectacular product failure. The ketchup that bombed! 

The multi-colored ketchup range launched by the famous Heinz, which is part of the $26-billion Kraft-Heinz group.

Let me start with this picture of Heinz ketchup. 

I bet you’ll say, ‘Whaaaaat!? That’s not ketchup! Ketchup is not the color of mud!’

So I’ll show you another one. What do you think?

You are going to say, ‘Come on, stop being ridiculous! Blue ketchup? What’s wrong with you?’

I know there is nothing wrong with me. So I’ll show you a third picture. Now what do you say?

I think you will say, ‘Yellow ketchup!? Why are you wasting my time?’

Undeterred, I will show you another picture. This one

And you will scream, ‘Stop it. This is not ketchup! I know what ketchup looks like! It has to be red!’

So I show you one more picture. 

And you say, ‘Right! This is ketchup! Heinz or whatever.’

Heinz, which had been selling its red ketchup very successfully since 1876, that is, for 147 years now, got this sudden inspiration that its ketchup was becoming boring. Red ketchup from red tomatoes? C’mon, be a little more imaginative, someone ‘creative’ inside or around the company said. Think differently. Why should tomato ketchup be red? Even if tomatoes are!

So Heinz experimented with different colors for its ketchups. And, as you can well imagine, it went to the extent of stripping the red color from traditional Heinz ketchup and adding artificial food colors to produce ketchups that were blue, brown, purple … 

These were branded EZ Squirt. Heinz even named the EZ Squirt versions with what it thought were catchy names. And catchy they indeed were, for a while. Names like Blastin’ Green, Stellar Blue, Passion Pink, Awesome Orange, Funky Purple, and Totally Teal. 

Kids loved them. 

Now why would Heinz, which had done business for 124 years already when it launched its different colored ketchups in the year 2000, do such a thing? 

The original red ketchup Heinz had launched a century and a half earlier, in 1876, had been a staple product on American shelves, and on shelves in many other countries. Heinz had launched this product soon after its own creation in 1869.

So what happened in the year 2000? Some innate nervousness about not keeping pace with the overall growth of the food products market? Impatience with a product that wouldn’t allow marketing and advertising geniuses the leeway to try out new-fangled tricks?

I mean, how do managers justify their existence if they cannot come up with some new trick every few years? So that’s what happened. You might think that the whole world was going yawn, yawn just looking at the Heinz ketchup. It needed a new look, a dramatic new re-entry on the world stage. 

And the company went for this ploy.

Okay. So how do you get additional sales? Address new segments. And what better new segment can you get but children? Children, who always want some new thing to keep them occupied. Children, who want to play with their food, not just eat it!

So, Heinz had found that ketchup versions with different colors would be fun and excitement for children. Add to that some different, ergonomically designed package that would fit young children’s hands – and zap! You’ve got a sale. Then tie it in with a super-popular children’s movie character. So what if the character is a big ogre? So long as he is a lovable big, strong, green ogre – the chances of success double! Zap, zap! 

Usually, when advertisers target children with their ads, they also have to persuade parents. Many parents have theories of their own on issues related to food and health. The Internet has made it easy for people to access articles on health, and health warnings abound in articles and video presentations.

But parents do not have the time nor the expertise to scrutinize every ingredient of every new product that comes on the market to see if they should buy it. Most of us have become accustomed to believing in advertising hype rather than questioning it. Reading the small print on product packages is something few people do.

And when a company camouflages its gimmick with another gimmick – a health gimmick – like Heinz’s trick, the addition of vitamin C to the ketchup, people get impressed. 

At least for some time, until the negative talk begins. 

The company’s marketing strategists knew that while parents do the buying, the company has children on its side to do the selling after seeing the ads. Parents were known to succumb to children’s demands provided those demands are within the bounds of health and safety. And provided, of course, parents can afford to meet those demands. 

So, while children loved the different colored sauces that Heinz offered them, and parents went along with the idea first, the realization dawned on parents that all the variations of the ketchup except the original red one actually got their color from decolorizing the ketchup and then adding artificial color to the sauce. 

That resulted in a negative consumer response. Consumers, not necessarily as the children who lapped up the ketchups colored green, brown, orange, and so on, but as parents who did the buying for the children.

As the truth became known, there was a backlash from parents, who said, enough is enough! We don’t want our children to consume synthetic dyes. 

Also, it’s one thing to capture children’s attention with ubiquitous advertising, and quite another to sustain it when there are so many other new things vying for their attention. The initial zing wears off, never to return. 

Once children’s attention tapered off, mothers were certainly not interested in throwing a range of colored ketchups in the shopping cart. The children were okay with the original red ketchup. 

So that was that. The end of the Heinz experiment with ketchups of different colors. 

Heinz sold more than 25 million bottles of colored ketchup, which helped it capture a record 60 per cent of the US ketchup market before sales stagnated and declined. The inevitable happened. The EZ Squirt brand was withdrawn by January 2006.

Oh, that doesn’t mean Heinz doesn’t sell ketchup any more. It continues selling its original red ketchup. 

Kraft Heinz which sell the ketchup, sells its products in over 40 countries worldwide. But its biggest market is still the United States.

Revenue from the company’s sauces and condiments segment (in which tomato ketchup plays a big part) amounted to $7.3 billion of the company’s total sales of $26 billion in 2021. 

The global market for tomato ketchup, which is expected to be $34.91 billion in 2023, is seen to be growing by 4.23 per cent per year until 2027. As much as $5.81 billion of 2023 sales are expected to be generated in the US in that year. 

And Kraft-Heinz continues to be the number one seller of tomato ketchups in the world. 

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