Heinz: It's Vinegars, Sauces, and Beans

Sad to say there will be no restaurant-based Foodstuffs of Mad Men today, as most of the action took place in the characters' office and homes. So here now, a look at the Heinz Ketchup commercials from the 1960s. Plus a bonus: a sort of insane commercial from 1965 featuring an old lady who destroys a restaurant and beats up the staff because she wasn't given Heinz-brand pickles.

So in last night's episode, "Chinese Wall," Faye tells Don that she'd gotten him a meeting with Heinz. "It's vinegars, sauces, and beans," she said. And we were curious what the advertising was like for Heinz circa 1964. Well, 1964 was coincidentally the same year that Heinz started running their "ketchup race" commercials, the first in a decades-long series of ads that stressed their ketchup's "slow-pouring qualities."

We learn from the obituary of Charles M. Berger, a marketing manager at Heinz, that he was the man responsible for these ads. Later commercials would have ketchup bottles (employing stop-motion animation) combat Western-style shout-out/pour-offs proclaiming Heinz Ketchup to be the "slowest ketchup in the West, East, North, and South."

He told Design Management Journal in 2001, "Heinz ketchup actually looks and tastes the way it did in 1890... In most cases, although you have to keep changing the product, the brand should be immortal."

Video: Heinz Original 'Ketchup Race' Ad (1964)

Video: Heinz Commercial: Slowest Ketchup in the West #1 (1960s)

Video: Heinz Commercial: Slowest Ketchup in the West #2 (1960s)

Video: Heinz Commercial: Say Hello to Big Mouth (1968)

This commercial takes a bizarre, almost antagonistic approach towards it customers in introducing the new wide-mouth bottle, "for all you people complain that Heinz is too hard to get out of the bottle."

Bonus Video: Heinz Pickles Commercial: Lady Destroys Restaurant (1965)

Video via archive.org:

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