Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup
A rainbow of ketchup colors made food fun.
Water will get you wet, fire will burn you, and tomato ketchup will be red. We take many things in our lives for granted. Then one day, you are in the supermarket, going to pick up a familiar bottle of Heinz Ketchup, and you spot a rainbow of colored ketchup bottles. Maybe green could be some sort of tomato, but what about the purple and blue? What is going on here? You look closer, trying to figure it out and your mind is blown because you just discovered Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup.
Launched in 2000, just in time for a tie-in with the release of Shrek (green), EZ Squirt wasn’t just colorful; it also came in an interesting bottle. These bottles were more like what had traditionally appeared on squeeze mustard bottles, creating a much finer stream that allowed you to make fun patterns on your food.
Over time, EZ Squirt would come in seven colors. In addition to a random Mystery Color in opaque bottles, they were:
Stellar Blue
Blastin’ Green
Funky Purple
Tomato Ketchup Red
Passion Pink
Awesome Orange
Totally Teal
It was strange to use the ketchups because, well, they tasted like ketchup. Green meatloaf? Purple burgers? Orange French fries? Anything was possible. It was a confusing but wonderful condiment rainbow.
In the first three years of its availability, Heinz sold 25 million bottles. But sadly, food trends were changing, and there was pressure to remove artificial colors from foods. Demand and availability slowed, and by 2006, these crazy-colored ketchups were no more. Surprisingly, despite a good amount of nostalgia for EZ Squirt, we haven’t had a revival except for a short-lived green offering at Burger King. As time goes on, the generation that grew up eating it might miss it more, so maybe one day we will see it on shelves and on our food once again.
(If you have retro finds you would like for me to share, I want to hear them. What old useful website are still lurking on the web? Some old TV show streaming online? Old tech being brought back? Let me know.)
ONE COOL VIDEO
EZ Squirt was easy to use and apply to food, but for a long time, Heinz leaned into the slowness of their product. They even had a slowest ketchup in the west ad campaign angle. My favorite of these commercials was from the 1980s and starred Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame. In the commercial, Matt does something magical with ketchup, that still makes me laugh after all these years (and not just because he is putting it on a hot dog.)
TEN THINGS RETRO
🐲 Roleplaying - In the eighties, TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, developed a syndicated radio show that would promote the game by broadcasting audio examples of play. Jon Peterson of Playing at the World reviews some excerpts from the unreleased pilot.
🎄 Christmas - History in Kodachrome has a nice treat for the holidays, a rare hard-to-find Christmas View-Master reel, based on The Night Before Christmas.
💡 Vintage Electronics - While looking at images of my childhood record player, a General Electric V639h, I stumbled across his wonderful old school website, Vintage General Electric. It is mostly images pulled from eBay with some information attached and its really fun to browse.
🚢 Music - You have probably heard of Yacht Rock. Born from a comedy series, it is a genre of music that has gained popularity even if it is sometimes difficult to define. A new HBO Original documentary was released that talks about origins of Yacht Rock and the artists who helped to define it.
🖥️ Computers - Computer Dating is nothing new, but did you ever wonder what the services were like back in its early days of the Sixties? The Cut has a great piece about Operation Match, which was probably the most popular service of its time.
🎮 Video Games -Spelunky was released in 2008 and has been ported to most modern systems. This year marked an important milestone because this is the year the the game finally got its official port for the venerable Commodore 64.
🎥 Movies - I had no idea that this was a thing, but apparently some people claim to hate the film, Forrest Gump, but is it true? Do People Actually Hate 'Forrest Gump'?
🛍️ Malls - You never know what you are going to find when you browse the videos of Vampire Robot. Want to get into the holiday spirit? They have plenty to watch, but you might want to start with this video of mall shopping in 1987.
🎵 Music - We had a trend in the 1990s where bands would play covers of TV theme songs. Maybe it was because it was one of the earlier generations to grow up with TV? Whatever the reason, they were growing in popularity and and artists like Joan Jett & the Blackhearts would even play themes when making an appearance on a national talk show. Here they are playing a cover of “Love Is All Around”, the theme from the classic Mary Tyler Moore Show.
🖥️ Computers - We all want a little space for ourselves, but what would we do with that space is very personal. Brian Green built himself a retro computer lab complete with dozens of functioning vintage computers. Living the dream.
SUBSTACK RECOMMENDATION
The Obsolete Sony social media account offers high quality retro images of “obsolete” Sony products. You can find their posts on most of the major socials, but recently they joined Substack and have started posting deeper information about retro Sony stuff. If you are a fan of this, you will be happy to hear they are taking it to print with a high-quality book called, Sony: Year by Year - A Visual Journey. It is currently on Kickstarter (already successful) and promises to take readers on a journey through seven decades of the company’s products.
FROM THE RETROIST ARCHIVE
Let's take a moment to look back at four posts from the Retroist's past. I have been at this a long time.
One Year Ago…
🧀 A History of American Cheese
Five Years Ago…
📷 The rise and fall of the Kodak Disc Camera
Ten Years Ago…
🔧 Happy Holidays from your Local Hardware Store
Fifteen Years Ago…
🎮 Atari 2600 Mines of Minos Review
If Heinz had introduced a squirty Shit Brown option, I'd have been all over it.
Our kids were just the right age (and Shrek fans) for us to try to green ketchup. There's something very visual about food and even though your brain said "it tastes like ketchup" my eyes said... "it's green." My the time it disappeared from shelves, my kids were over Shrek... and colored ketchup.