Don’t mess with ketchup! Heinz’s label of truth and why it matters

It’s not exactly science news, but this is a fascinating case of biology-meets-art-meets-business. The human eye has millions of years of selection for subtle differences in color—animators can tell you how hard it is to get green vegetables to look right—specifically to identify food and non-food plants. These people are using our prehistoric skill to fight fraud.

Restaurants and other food vendors would finish (and hopefully wash) bottles of Heinz ketchup and then refill the containers with other condiments. This is a form of food fraud, or economically motivated adulteration, per the FDA.

Heinz identified the exact Pantone color of its ketchup and changed the shade of its label to match it exactly. With some help from the literal transparency of is containers, the counterfeit condiments were easily exposed. Genuine Heinz ketchup is so red that it would make the label border disappear. The browner substitutes would not. This is the first time I’ve heard of having food that looks like a crayon work out in a positive way.

The team, led by creative director Onur Kutluer out of Instanbul, Turkiye, seems very willing to see the joke in all this. The text following the color scale on its trop from kindergarten-red to BBQ brown is marked “Heinz,” “Not Heinz,” “Still Not Heinz,” and “Is That Even Ketchup?”

Food fraud might sound harmless, but it is not. I once worked with a scout troop in which one scout had food allergies. We wanted to do the usual snack ritual, so we asked what we could give this scout so the whole troop could eat together. “Oreos,” said the scout’s parent. “Just Oreos.” My fellow event coordinator showed up with knockoffs. I figure the reasoning was that they had the same ingredients as Oreos, and they probably did. But we looked at the package, and it said “Made in a facility that processes nuts.” That was why the parent had said Oreos, because of the nuts! We apologized to the allergic scout and we did better the next time. But the reason we didn’t have an incident that day is because all the food was labeled and packaged honestly. We had one participant who had one disappointment, not a cancelled event or a medical emergency.

Even if the knockoffs are just as good, sometimes there are other differences that pack a punch.