PITTSBURGH (AP) - Heinz is adding “Funky Purple” to its crayon box of condiment colors. The company, hoping to build on last year’s success with a “Blastin’ Green” ketchup, said Tuesday the new purple ketchup will be on store shelves in September. “Purple is one of the hottest colors for kids right now. In an era when kids can’t get enough monsters and wizards, the bold, powerful, color purple has reached new heights of popularity,” said Jay de Sibour, president of the Color Marketing Group, a not-for-profit international association of designers. “It’s consistently a kid favorite.”
Aren’t you glad you don’t have Jay de Sibour’s job as president of the Color Marketing Group? “What did you do at work today, honey?” “Ummm . . . I hadda come up with a statment for the press about why purple is a good color for ketchup.” “Oh, Jay . . . Are you SURE you don’t want to go back to med school?”
Hey, as long as they don’t sell it at their new football stadium, I couldn’t care less. Let the kids eat whatever color ketchup they want, I’ll stick with classic red.
Now, is this purple ketchup dyed tomato ketchup, or grape-apple ketchup?
(Not I care that much. Given the choice between eating tomato ketchup and eating, saying, live cockroaches, I’d probably choose the roaches. My wife, OTOH, primarily sees food as an excuse to have tomato ketchup, and wasn’t even aware that there were other kinds of ketchup until we got married (her mother’s culinary skills are nothing to boast of)).
Maybe it’s me, off on a tangent again . . . But I don’t find the concept of “purple ketchup” as weird as I find the concept of “Jay de Sibour, president of the Color Marketing Group.” How did he GET that job? What kind of training does it entail, and what does he DO all day? Sit around fielding calls from people saying, “hey, Jay—we’re planning on selling purple ketchup. Could you come up with some pithy prose on what a great idea it is? See if ya can work in references to wizards or somethin’. Love ya, Jay!”
I don’t know whether I envy or pity Jay de Sibour, president of the Color Marketing Group.
My favorite quote is, “While blue will maintain its enviable position as the most important color of the decade, orange is foreseen to be the hue of optimism and happiness in 2002. It will find popularity in all age groups.”
I vote for brown, which exemplifies what the good folks at the Color Marketing Group are full of!
Purple ketchup? That surprises me, like, not at all.
Heinz did a good thing a few years back when it realized that the core of its target market was made up of kids. You might think “Hey, ketchup appeals to everyone” and you’re probably right, but it appeals mostly to kids. Cecil mentioned its ability to overwhelm the taste of almost anything in a column once. That’s why kids love it. It’s sweet, acidic, and overwhelming.
So you really can’t blame Heinz for tinkering a bit in an attempt to appeal to kids. Purple ketchup may be weird, but kids will undoubtedly beg Mom to buy it.
Eve, how would you like to be the VICE President of the Color Marketing Group?
My sister-in-law is one of those people who is overly picky about her food. Won’t eat red meat in steak form (it has an “icky texture”) despite the argument of “it tastes the same”, won’t eat this, won’t eat that. Mostly, her reasoning is illogical and haphazard. However, she also has the largest collection of stuffed animals and toys of any 30+ person without kids I’ve ever met.
However, she gets the green ketchup. Her argument? It tastes the same.
My love for ketchup is well enough known that I received a bottle of Blastin’ Green as a gift. And green is my favorite color. But it does not taste the same, much to my disappointment. It tastes like ketchup with a bucket of food dye in it. It’s a shame, because otherwise I’d buy it all the time.
What they really need is to come out with blue ketchup and yellow ketchup. With those and regular ketchup you’d be able to mix any pure-tone ketchup you wanted. Come out with black ketchup and white ketchup and food artists would be competely set.
(I know someone is going to suggest using yellow mustard instead of yellow ketchup. This would work for coloration, but I was figuring you’d still want to have your food be moderately palatable)
They make the world’s supply of colored ketchup in a factory not far from me in Iowa. They started making the stuff as a marketing experiment, and it took off so rapidly they had to double the production line, they even had to build new plant space. Oh yes they are pumping out the green and purple ketchup.
As a child, I begged my mother to let me add green food-coloring to my mashed potatoes. I did, and they became magically inedible. I couldn’t even bear to look at them. I don’t remember the color being so much “Lily Pad” as it was “Mossy”. Perhaps there was the problem. Those potatoes looked like they’d only work outside, and not on my plate.
I’ve seen the green ketchup on the supermarket shelf, and while I do like ketchup (not on hot dogs, however; Cecil broke me of that repulsive habit), I couldn’t quite get my mind wrapped around green ketchup. It’s just, well, gross!