Green Ketchup!?

[lynne]

Wandering through the grocery store night I found: black, neon blue and neon green pudding; blue, neon green and neon pink applesauce, juice in colours that do not exist and green ketchup!

Green Ketchup! I guess I'm a purist -- I like my ketchup to be red, my mustard yellow and my applesauce to be apple coloured!

I agree, green ketchup is so not right. My son saw this in the grocery store and wanted it..... NO NO NO NO!!!! It is just so wrong!

Green ketchup is almost as bad as black white sauce.

I don't like the way it looks either. Ketchup is red.

Your son reacted the way the makers wanted kids to. I read that the ketchup makers made the green stuff to increase sales by making it appealing to kids.

[foodnfoto]

The Heinz people came and pitched this product to a bunch of us food editors about a year and a half ago saying they developed it to appeal to kids. They also said their market research concluded that many people believe ketchup is a vegetable and that the green color would emphasize this belief and hence, sell more ketchup. I was shocked that large food companies would deliberately misinform their consumers. Although food coloring is benign, I think we do a disservice to our children by giving these neon colored "foods" to them. They grow up thinking this stuff is what a person should eat instead of beautiful array of real food available anywhere.

[lynne]

That's just it!

Think of the wonderful colours on a grilled vegetable plate! The array of textures and colours in a simple pasta salad!

What kid doesn't eat ketchup even if it is "only" red?

Since when did we have a hard time getting kids to eat ketchup? It is the one thing they will eat! Marketing ketchup to kids is like marketing God to the pope!!

[Anneke]

Since when do kids prefer a green food over a red food?

Did a Harvard MBA come up with that?

[palmier]

Marketing 101: Offering a different ketchup puts 2 of your products on the shelf. Little Johny likes green ketchup, but his older (more sofisticated, 12 year old)sister prefers red. You just sold 2 bottles. Other examples: New Coke....Pepsi Clear (remember that one?)....ETC.ETC.

[shroomgirl]

Well, as a mom of a child with neurological impairments who has horrible behavioral changes when he injests food dyes this to me is just one more additive that some (probably more than we know) kids will have to deal with....like the ADD hyperactive ones that noone has checked out for allergies.

[lynne]

Out of curiosity, has anyone seen commercials for this green ketchup? I know I don't necessarily see a lot of TV, but the only Heinz commercials I've noticed have been the buy me, I've got a new drippless cap variety.

If you have seen them, what is their hook? ho are they promoting it?

Foodnfoto, as a food stylist, how would you reccomend shooting it (like what background on what foods)? Yum, green ketchup looking like green toxic ooze over my bed of fries...yumyum.

[lynne]

Of course, toxic green ooze could appeal to some kids I guess...

This tells you who they are targeting:
http://www.heinz.com/jsp/new_prod.jsp

[Mezzaluna]

Crudeau, you hit it on the head (as usual): it's the kids they want. More specifically, it's the parents of the kids who can get away with telling their parents what to do and how to spend the money. I'm amazed at how some parents (too many, IMHO) let their kids tell them what to buy- and the parents dutifully do what their kids tell them to do, never learned to say no. ARRRRGH! Who's the parent, anyway?

[foodnfoto]

Lynne-
This stuff would be a real monster to shoot. Red ketchup squishing out of hamburgers is hard enough to take, but green too?
The way I've seen it advertised is kids having fun squeezing both colors of ketchup onto their burgers. Actually, the ad is pretty effective; my 5 yo son said "Mom! Can we get that?!"
So it"s more the fun of the activity than the visual appeal of the "food" that grabs you.

By the way, have you seen dinosaur eggs oatmeal from Quaker? Talk about foods guaranteed to make you hurl! Lumpy oatmeal with candy dinosaur eggs with shells that melt and turn your oatmeal Ty-D-Bol blue.