Household names: Heinz
Henry J. Heinz was one of the 19th-century American tycoons who within a generation made the United States an industrialized nation. Between 1869 and 1919, he was a dominant force in the developments that revolutionized American agriculture, food processing, and eating habits. He started out very poor, enjoyed phenomenal success early in life, suffered terrible failure, and then picked himself up again, to become one of those to whom the writer Edith Wharton referred as the Lords of Pittsburgh. The others were Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse and Mellon. They made their fortunes in fuel, heavy metals, railroads and machinery, but Heinz made his in the primary business of feeding people. He founded what was to become a giant company in a new industry, and carried its products and philosophy round the world.
At a time when factory workers were little more than tools of production and labour laws were non-existent, Heinz campaigned and crusaded for clean and pleasant working conditions, and for compulsory leisure time for workers. He built a model factory complex in the 1890s, and risked his livelihood by pressing for federal legislation to ban false or misleading food labels and food processing that used harmful chemicals. This legislation was passed in 1906.
Henry J. Heinz started his empire with bottles of his mother’s grated horseradish. When he first set up in business in 1869 with L. Clarence Noble in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, foods were largely preserved by drying, smoking or salting, limiting the available off-season range to what could be preserved by those processes. Bottling was revolutionary, because it allowed the preservation of a greater range of foods, but the public still needed to be won over. Heinz and Noble earned their customers’ trust by using clear glass to distinguish their product from what their rivals sold: shredded horseradish padded out with leaves, wood fibre or turnip filler and disguised in green glass bottles. Heinz’s use of clear glass was a visual assertion of his own aphorism: “Quality is to product what character is to man”. The ploy worked. Heinz’s bottled horseradish sold well, and other products soon followed. There were pickles, sauerkraut and vinegar, delivered by horse-drawn wagons to grocers in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company expanded quickly but was forced into bankruptcy in the banking panic of 1875, and Heinz found that the grocers he once supplied from his hundred acres of garden would not even give him credit to feed his family.
Undeterred, he started out again that same year with his brother John and his cousin Frederick. Despite the economic depression, they successfully introduced something called tomato ketchup, still one of the company’s most recognisable products today. Once again, a series of preserved foods quickly followed, but this time the company’s growth was unstoppable. Henry J. Heinz had tapped into a social tendency—people don’t mind someone else taking care of at least some of their food preparation as long as it’s done well using good ingredients. Heinz recognised the fact that his potential market was not just America, enormous though that was, but the world.
In 1886, he set off for England with his family and a Gladstone bag containing “seven varieties of our finest and newest goods”. He had no prior appointment to show the goods to any potential buyers, but his persistence paid off in the form of a meeting with a buyer at Fortnum and Mason, a purveyor of fine foods in London, a city that was then a world centre for trade in food, and also the capital of the vast British Empire. The buyer liked what he saw and tasted, and decided to stock the full range, setting Heinz on the fast track to global success. According to historian Richard Tames, Heinz returned to Sharpsburg “exultantly proclaiming that henceforth ‘our field is the world’.” And so it was.
During World War II, the Heinz plant in Harlesden produced a range of self-heating canned foods for use by servicemen in the battlefield. The cans contained a metal tube in their middle, filled with a chemical fuel. When the cap was removed and the fuse lit, British and American troops could enjoy a hot meal within minutes. These are two such cans, the property of the Malta representatives of Heinz, George Borg Ltd.Within a decade, Heinz had opened an office near the Tower of London, followed in 1905 by a factory in Peckham. That year, he introduced the baked bean to an unprepared British public, which now rates it as one of Britain’s national foods. The attempt flopped badly. The beans were an unknown new food and they came in cans, which were still something of a novelty. At the upper end of the social scale, baked beans could not compete on quality, interest and taste with the fresh variety, and at the lower end they were too expensive to have any particular appeal. (Now, baked beans are an individual food in their own right, and comparisons are never made with fresh beans.) Heinz did not give up. He filed away the ‘baked bean’ idea and concentrated on what sold well, including an own-brand salad cream introduced in 1914, which is still selling well today.
Henry Heinz died 1919 at the age of 75, and was succeeded in the business by his son Howard. Nine years later, Howard Heinz made an attempt at reintroducing baked beans to Britain. This time, it worked. The beans were produced at a plant Heinz acquired at Harlesden, making them cheaper because they were locally made rather than imported from the USA, as they were when his father had tried the idea. Partly because of the lower cost, partly because canned food was now better known, but mostly because of a massive advertising campaign which was among the first of its kind, baked beans went on to become a staple food in Britain. By the 1960s, the name of Heinz was inextricably linked with baked beans, and that is when one of the most famous and successful food advertising campaigns of all time was splashed across the media, with the strapline Beanz Meanz Heinz. By that time, Heinz had become a Purveyor to the Queen, sealing, in the British food shopper’s mind, the idea that Heinz was a British company though it was, and remains today, American.
he Heinz philosophy had always been to grow from within, so new plants were started up from scratch as product lines were added. Soon, however, the Heinz company began to buy ready-grown food companies and production bases all over the world. By 1972, it had reached the billion-dollar mark in sales, and today it is an enterprise with more than 110 major production locations worldwide. As Henry John Heinz liked to say, “To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.”