Ketchup King: The H.J. Heinz Story

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And we love to tell stories about business, and we love to tell stories about entrepreneurs and how they change the world, change the nation, and in the end, drive our economy. Heinz’s food products have been a part of American culture for more than a century. Though Heinz Catchup is one of the most recognized corporate symbols in the world, few people know anything at all about its creator, H. J. Hines. His hard work, innovation, and obsessive kindness proved one of his favorite sayings: “To do a common thing uncommonly well, bring success.” Here’s Greg Hangler with the story of H. J. Hines.

Your kitchen’s coming on a lot more than ours. That’s not good manners. Well, you notice our Heinz here tasted.

The base.

The bay.

That’s keke like every day.

Let’s bring it on a little bit, the rich Heinz keen taste. That’s worth the wait.

The Heinz family saga begins with the determination of immigrants to make a better life for themselves. Beginning in the sixteen eighties, many German immigrants took the long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to Pencil. In eighteen forty-three, John and Anna Hines, both recent arrivals from Germany, settled outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. John became a brickmaker. The next year they had their first child, a boy they named Henry John, or H. J. The Hines family would grow to include nine children: four boys and five girls. One of their daughters, however, died when she was only a baby. Like many German immigrants, Mr. and Mrs. Hines believed the importance of hard work. Every day, H. J. would pick up vegetables in the family garden before walking over a mile each way to his Lutheran school and back, a school run by his church. Upon his arrival back, he would continue working in the plot until sunset. Henry’s love of gardening is evident in the very first photo, where his knuckles are visibly swollen from the hard work. Here’s the president of the Heinz History Center, Andy Mask, and Heinz biographer Quentin Scrabeck.

Like many of the other German immigrant boys here in Pittsburgh, he spoke with a German accent, though he went to American schools, and he felt very much American.

It was typical for German families to work as an economic union. The children would do work like that, but most of them didn’t take it up as a career long-term. He was re creative and saw, “Gee, I can make money here. I can make a living here. I can make a business out.”

Of this for radish.

Henry Hines was just fifteen years old when he started his business in downtown Pittsburgh.

“I’ll take one jard, yes, sir.”

He started by canning horseradish that his mother grew in her garden and sold it on the streets of Pittsburgh, pushing a handcart, a wheelbarrow around. And people loved the product, and he thought, “Well, let’s try some other things.”

Two years later, his little business had grown so much that he now needed a horse to pull his cart.

“Hello, hello, Mom.” He was very influenced by his mother. She knew how to play on his feelings and to encourage him when he was down, and he learned some of those people’s skills from his mother.

Anna Hines is a disciplined and devout Christian mother, training and instructing her children with Bible lessons, stressing the importance of serving others and counting them as more significant than themselves.

His mother was very religious. She converted to Lutheranism, and she sent young Henry to the Lutheran seminary nearby, thinking that maybe one day he would be a minister.

She thought this until she saw his love of the family garden. Here’s former advertising executive at Heinz, Edwin Luhou.

She made the children work from sunrise to sunset in this garden, and H. J. was the only one who favored it. In fact, he stayed out there long after the hours were over.

H. J.’s talent and passion were playing to see, so when he turned twelve, his mother proudly presented her firstborn with three acres of land for his birthday. The young entrepreneur quickly developed and marketed a growing line of produce and homemade condiments, and shortly after, his little farm tripled in size. At fifteen, H. J. quit school in order to focus entirely on his business, waking at three a.m. so he could take his vegetables to stores in Pittsburgh, only to return home and work for his father making bricks. Here’s Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Cohen, and as…

A very successful junior entrepreneur, selling cabbage and cucumberers and zucchini and tomato off his wagon to neighbors, and has a growing list of customers. And from the very beginning, from his earliest days of peddling horseradish door-to-door or from a wagon with his own horse, he wanted to make sure his customers got only pure food.

H. J. is obsessed with purity. As a Christian, he associates purity with goodness. Fresh food is healthy food. This was in an age when Americans were suspicious of factory-made food, and with good reason. It was often packaged in filthy conditions and contained a stomach-turning, a array of cheap fillers like leaves or wood pulp and chemical preservatives. While his competitors used golden-brown bottles to hide add-ins and imperfections, H. J. made a point of selling his mother’s horseradish recipe in clear glass jars. H. J. wanted his customers to believe that the food he delivered was worth every penny they spent on it. Thanks to his mother’s recipes and beliefs, people grew to trust the Heinz name.

And what a story this is! And we will continue with the story of H. J. Hines. And my goodness, it sounds like so many of the other entrepreneurial stories we did. No matter what the ethnicity of the story, well, it sounds the same: service to customers. More on the H. J. Hines story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, as we approach our nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories in this story of H. J.

Hines.

And he started as a boy canning his mom’s horseradish, and again, dropping out of school and just getting to work. We continue now with the story of H. J. Hines.

Thanks to his mother’s recipes and beliefs, people grew to trust the Heinz name. Here again is the president of the Heinz History Center, Andy Mason.

Henry was always a meticulous man. He was a hard worker, and he kept detailed notes. He kept journals and record books, and so he was not only mathematical, but he had a human side to him. He was kind of left- and right-brained, both so he could figure out the forms for things and keep good records. But he was also a people person.

In eighteen sixty-one, seventeen-year-old Henry sold twenty-four hundred dollars worth of produce, about sixty-eight thousand dollars in today’s money. And by eighteen sixty-six, Henry became a partner in his father’s brick company and quickly made changes. At the time most brickyards shut down for the winter, Henry decided to heat the small factory so it could stay open through the cold months. That way, the company would have a supply of bricks ready when the demand for bricks rose in the spring. In eighteen sixty-nine, at twenty-five years of age, H. J. met Sarah Young at his church, a daughter of Irish immigrants, who would bring his new household what his mother had to the old religious devotion and a stable emotional foundation. On a train to New York, they met another couple planning to marry. H. J., spotting an opportunity to save money, suggested that both couples share a minister and marry the same day. Eighteen sixty-nine was also the year H. J. and his neighborhood friend Clarence Noble started a company designed to sell horseradish, pickles, and sauerkraut across the Eastern Seaboard. As H. J.’s company grew, so did his family. A daughter named Irene in eighteen seventy-one, and two years later, a boy named Clarence. H. J. and Sarah would have five children.

One of the things he learned early on was that people weren’t sure about canned products or things in jars. Sometimes people got sick eating the products of other people. So Henry found that he didn’t put his labels on the jar at first; he put somebody else’s label on the jar. And if nobody got sick, and if people liked it, then he put his label on the next batch.

The Heinz and Noble Company was profitable until eighteen seventy-five, when mistakes by Noble in the Panic of Eighteen Seventy-three suddenly threatened its existence. H. J. turned to his father and a friendly banker who loaned money. Even his wife pitched in, but by the year’s end, the company was bankrupt. Here’s Heinz’s biographer Eleanor Dinstagg and Nancy Cohen.

The diaries read like a Dickensian novel. They’re heartrending. He had boils; his wife took to bed. He was too depressed to go to church, which was unthinkable for him. His brother started to take to drink. The whole family was collapsing.

Several creditors accused him of basically falsifying his records and demanded that he be arrested. He was arrested, held in jail for a day, and came back the next day to face what was an ever-mounting load of debts and unpaid bills.

It was Christmas; the Hines couldn’t even afford to buy a single present for their children. Here again is Heinz biographer, Quentin Scrabeck.

He probably went through one phase of real depression. I mean, there were several months where he was pretty much immobilized.

In bet, H. J. believed his friends were shunning him. He wrote mournfully, “I have no money, so I have no friends.” His parents mortgaged their house to raise funds, only to see it repossessed. Creditors came and sold off his mother’s furniture. Awash in shame, H. J. could only watch helplessly as the crisis consumed his aging father. Here’s Heinz Family archivist Frank Kurtik. Henry J.

Heinz’s father had raised a family, estopped a home in America as an immigrant, and he saw…

Much of his life wiped out before his eyes. The elder Hines would never recover, spending his final years in and out of sanitariums. A broken man. Through this and other dark moments in his life, H. J. was anchored by his twin beliefs: belief in God and God’s unshakable plan for his life. Just two months after the bankruptcy, on New Year’s Day, eighteen seventy-six, H. J. picked himself up and asked the only people to have stayed by his side—his family—to help him start a new business. Together they formed the Heinz Food Company. The whole family pitched in, and his mother and sisters began bottling horseradish in the basement of their home. Starting a brand-new company on a slim budget, H. J. had to travel by foot to the vegetable fields to have a horse again. He bought himself a bargain: a blind horse.

He owed a lot of people in Pittsburgh money, a lot of grocers and so forth. He made a pledge that he would pay them back, even illegally didn’t have to, and that was one of the key things in his life as well. He spent four or five years repaying back grocers, farmers, and suppliers.

Through his leadership, H. J. guided to Heinz Food Company to immediate success, taking special pleasure in culinary innovations.

He was experimenting like a woman in the kitchen, making it up as he went along, and his notebooks were chok a block full of fascinating recipes: everything from peanut butter (which he did not pursue) to baked beans (which he did very successfully) to Chutney’s.

In eighteen seventy-six, he created the condiment that future generations would associate with his name. Here again is Edwin Luhou.

When he was in England that they had a product called catsup, which was made of fish and different ingredients and different spices. It was a very spicy condiment, and he liked it. And he thought, “I wonder if we substituted tomatoes for the fish, what that would taste like.”

This is how we get the word ketchup. It comes from the Chinese word “catsup,” which is a kind of fish sauce. Here again is Animes.

Yes, it is good. Ketchup was probably invented in China one thousand years ago, but H. J. Hines brought it to a new level.

There were several types of ketchup in the nineteenth century, but none of them sold particularly well. Apart from Heinz, no one saw potential in the red vegetable sauce. Pittsburgh was home of the steel industry, but it was also a center for glassmaking. Unlike his competitors, Heinz believed that his customers should be able to see the bright red ketchup. This, however, had a drawback.

You know, when you look in a ketchup bottle, sometimes it gets kind of dark and rubbery, kind of oxidized near the top. Well, he knew that people would be put off by seeing that, so he put a paper label near the neck of the bottle so the product looked red and beautiful.

Heinz built a new factory, which still stands today as an industrial monument in Pittsburgh. The factory was one of the first in the country run on electricity, and Heinz would be the first to put up an electric billboard in New York City. The Pittsburgh headquarters site offered easy access to the Allegheny River and railroad lines. The whole neighborhood smelled of vinegar—then as now, the main preservative. As indispensable as H. J. was to the company, he was just as valuable to his church. He was especially dedicated to teaching the children about the Bible and their Christian faith at Sunday School. In fact, H. J. would travel all over the world in order to promote the idea of Sunday School. H. J. was also known for his generosity. He would build a barning home for homeless children. The poor would count on him for a meal, and he would often loan money to his customers so they could stay in business. Heinz placed his factory in the midst of Andrew Carnegie’s steel factory and rival steelmakers. But Heinz’s revenues would one day surpass those of his larger neighbors.

H. J. Hines was an intuitive marketer. He had a sense of how to sell things. And although he didn’t invent ketchup, he marketed it better than anyone in the world.

And when we come back, more of this great American story, this great Pittsburgh story. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories in the life of H. J. Hines. Let’s pick up where we last left off.