Heinz's New Ketchup Packet: A Step In The Wrong Direction

I'm pretty sure it had more to do with the greying of america (and elsewhere), and how every company is trying to make their packaging (and stores, and readability, etc etc) more user-friendly for senior citizens.

who cares, you dont have to eat ketchup in your car unless you want to...it's stupid to waste hours of your life creating blogs about things that dont matter, there are tonnes more interesting things going on around the world, and in america, for you to be wasting your talent, writing about ketchup.

I have to admit, I'm a fan of the old school ketchup bottle. Just seems right somehow. And no, you can't use it in a mini-van, but that's a good thing. Hopefully this will soon go the way of the colored ketchup of a few years ago. (green ketchup? What were they thinking???)

And any product that PROMOTES eating in the car should just be banned. Period.

Wow! Ketchup packages that are more user friendly are good. Spending all kinds of time, energy and money on what some called a "vegetable" seems silly.

But all the schoolkids are wondering -- can you still smash 'em on the sidewalk?

Somehow, in recent years, I have developed a near aversion to ketchup. I do use it on my hot dogs, but that is it. And if YOU are using it near me, it's all over. Something about ketchup on another plate kills me. k-ster uses it on his eggs and to come to the sink and find that dish sitting there- I am almost retching. I can't believe the new packaging. Just what we needed.

I find it difficult to believe that this is going to CHANGE people's habits - the reality is that if people were already forgoing family meals for drive-thru fast food, ketchup delivery systems aren't going to change that. I don't think that a family meals parent (like myself) is going to suddenly change habits b/c of this package. I do applaud the efforts of Heinz to reduce packaging material by 15% by 2015 (http://plasticsnews.com/headlines2.html?id=17811). Now if they'd just do something about that HFCS....

LOVED this post. Wonderful! And to answer your question, I really don't care because it is "no big deal!"

"I'd prefer companies took a little time to make it easier to actually eat home-cooked food." Hear, hear, I'm all for cooking meals at home and feeding my family my labor of love!

~Virginia

Less ketchup + More packaging = Step Backwards

It hadn't even occurred to me that this would be encouraging eating on the run and fewer at-home meals, but reading this I realize that this new innovation really bums me out on multiple levels.

The design is ONLY better for dunking [and maybe safer squeezing, I'll give them that]. I imagine a ton of people will NOT recycle the bottom part, thus making a much worse situation for landfills.

I don't really eat fast food [save the occasional In N Out], so this mostly won't touch my life. (& I love that In N Out already has pump dispensers and little paper cups for their dine-in customers!)

I'm assuming this is replacing the ketchup packets you would get at fast food. So to me it's not a big deal. It's not a NEW product, just a replacement and the design IS better. As someone else mentioned, if part of it is recyclable, all the better. I personally hate the old package. Overall, it's not a big deal to me because I don't really eat fast food but I imagine for those who do, it's better.

I am a busy mom with a busy schedule and I'm still not feeding my kids in the car. When this first came out, I was sort of confused by the excitement! I'm sure glad it's available for Surma people (from a remote corner of Ethiopia). I simply cannot imagine how grateful they must be to have this universal need fulfilled. :)

0.95oz/27g packages? When the common single-serving packet is 1.25 oz? I can only hope they don't sell these in handy 'economy' clusters of 15 when Heinz already has a 14-oz bottle for sale.

But hey, that's one way to get kids to eat their fruit, right? *g*

I think one further question is how much of the new packaging is recyclable. Perhaps the bottom bit? If so, and if people actually recycle it (big if, I know), then maybe the new package has some advantage over the old package, which I believe is completely non-recyclable and would produce more waste than just the lid of the new package.

But I'm the type who tends to make my own condiments, anyway, so it's kind of a rhetorical question for me. (I love that there's a Related Post above on how to make ketchup.)