Heinz

“Anyway, in 2010, the year Mark Ramadan and Scott Norton decided to start a ketchup brand, Heinz sold 10 and a half billion dollars of the stuff.”

“Our experience pretty quickly was that, especially the natural food shoppers, they weren't really buying Hellman's and Best Foods anyway, because they perceived it to be gross for whatever reason. And so it was an opportunity to actually say, well, here's a hu…”

“We humans consume more than twenty billion dollars worth of ketchup a year, and half of it? Heinz.”

“I think when we read this as food people, it didn't make sense to us that the only thing that matters to market dominance is the formula of a product. Of course it's not. That takes zero account of how people think about brand, how people discover brands, how …”

“My official on the record statement is that it just hasn't been sufficiently challenged yet. So I await the next generation of ketchup entrepreneurs to fulfill the mission that we could not fully fulfill.”

“But every other ketchup out there would copy Heinz, the market leader, on the packaging, the materials, the brand positioning. It looked like a copycat, right? It was Heinz, but less so.”

“If anything, we saw inertia as the competitor. People are on, you know, they're not impulse buying different catch-ups every week, and so the real competitor was Habit. And so we thought about how do we break a habit rather than how do we switch people away fr…”