Lee and I were watching the news last Thursday evening (yes, we’re old-school geeks–we still watch network news. On an actual television. Humor me in my dotage). During a commercial break, the announcer teased a story about “ground-breaking news in the fast-food industry.”
Cool, I thought. Maybe this’ll be something blog-worthy. I waited, optimistically, hoping for news that portion sizes were being reduced, or some brilliant, carcinogen-free new alternative to deep-frying had been developed.
What was this amazing, revolutionary fast food news? New ketchup packaging. No joke. Apparently, the manual dexterity required to open one of those little squeezy packs of ketchup (you know, the ones you’ve been opening your entire life?) is just too challenging for most Americans. We need better access to our ketchup.
Over the course of that evening, we saw THREE separate stories about the new ketchup packaging–one on the network evening news, one on our local affiliate’s late news, and one on CNN. That’s right–prime time news. Ketchup packets. One would assume that the R&D necessary to research, test, and produce an entirely new system of ketchup service would run into some big dollars. I haven’t dug around to find out how much was spent to bring us this miracle of engineering, but I’m guessing it was a lot of money.
Interestingly, when I went online and read the actual press release from Heinz, I found that the company is trying to address some health concerns–they’re reducing sodium in all their basic ketchups, and they’re coming out with a new line that will be made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Neither of those innovations made the news reports, though.
Apparently, the media thinks most Americans just want to hear about how we won’t have to work as hard to get ketchup onto our fries. How . . . misguided.
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It’s a packaging inovation!!! http://www.heinzketchup.com/dip_squeeze.pdf