The Myth of the 57 Varieties: The Heinz Condiment Illusion

The phrase “Heinz 57” stands as one of the most successful corporate branding triumphs in industrial food history, yet its ubiquity has permanently obscured the historical reality behind its creation. For over a century, mainstream consumers have operated under the assumption that the “57 Varieties” slogan represented either an literal inventory count, a specialized secret recipe, or the chronological release of H.J. Heinz & Co.’s early product line. It was none of these things.

When Henry John Heinz first conceived the marketing campaign in 1896, his company was already manufacturing well over 60 distinct commercial items. The choice of the number fifty-seven was not a reflection of agricultural accounting, but a calculated dive into psychological consumer perception. More importantly, the slogan served as a powerful branding umbrella that allowed the company to project the image of a vast culinary empire while it secretly initiated a massive, structural consolidation, a pivot that would eventually allow a single, heavily preserved condiment to conquer the American grocery aisle.

Heinz History

The company was started by Henry John Heinz, of Pittsburgh, in 1876, after initial success with his first company, called Heinz & Noble, which went bankrupt during the financial crash of 1875, after expanding too aggressively. He set up the new company with is brother and cousin and called it F. and J. Heinz, later changed to H.J. Heinz. During the 1880s, the company brought out one product after another, concentrating on canned (“tinned” in those days) and bottled products.

Heinz Began with Horseradish, Canned Vegetables and Many Other Products

Although we think of Heinz mostly as a Ketchup and sauce company, in those days they made canned vegetables, canned spaghetti, baked beans, olive oil, and even peanut butter. They had a full line of soups, including cream soups. They had a line of fruit preserves, including figs and a mincemeat mix. Also, pickles were a big part of the companies line. All these hundreds of products started with an unlikely seeming beginning, bottled horseradish called “Heinz’s Evaporated Horse Radish” which Heinz manufactured with his partner L. Clarence Noble.

By 1900 Heinz was one of the largest food-producing companies in the world and had over 200 products and nine factories. Heinz still carries some of these types of products, either under its own brand or others. The availability of products depends on your country. For instance, while Heinz soups are still available in the U.K. many in the U.S. never realized they existed (Heinz does sell soup in the U.S. under the Heinz Chef Francisco brand).

While this massive, sprawling inventory of over 200 products allowed H.J. Heinz to project the image of a vast agricultural empire, maintaining a footprint in general grocery canning eventually became a major corporate vulnerability. It was the company’s strategic decision to systematically abandon the general canning space to rivals like Del Monte—refocusing their manufacturing power almost exclusively onto specialized bottled condiments—that allowed their flagship sauce to achieve absolute market dominance. By engineering an intense, vinegar-and-sugar preservation formula to survive the transition, Heinz didn’t just out-produce the competition; they completely altered the American palate’s baseline expectations for flavor, a corporate and chemical conquest detailed in our exploration of how Heinz used sauce specialization to defeat Del Monte.

Over 5000 Products and Many Brands

Today, the company has over 5000 products, with fifty affiliates operating in around 200 countries. Heinz owns the brands StarKist, Ore-Ida, Weight Watchers, T.G.I. Fridays packaged products, Quality Chef, Jack Daniels Sauces, Wattie’s, Plasmon, Farley’s, The Budget Gourmet, Rosetto, Bagel Bites, John West, Petit Navire, Earth’s Best, Orlando, Olivine, Pudlizki, 9-Lives Cat Food, Ken-LRation, Kibbles ‘n Bits, Pup-Peroni, and Nature’s Recipe (pet food), to name just a few.

There’s More to Ketchup than Heinz! I scoured the data to find the true origin of ketchup. Explore the ketchup etymology from ancient Asian fish sauce (ke-tsiap) to modern tomato ketchup. Read More: The Origin of Ketchup: A Surprisingly Worldly History

Origin of Heinz 57 Varieties

Heinz himself came up with the Heinz 57 Varieties branding idea. He had a good reason for doing it and it was precisely because the company had so many products. In the late 1800s branding wasn’t exactly a primitive science. Food companies in those days were already quite clever in how they branded their products. The usual practice was the same as today, create brands around individual products. A few companies, however, focused on creating trust around the company name.

Heinz was already an innovative advertiser. He stated product demonstrations and free sample giveaways, and at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 the company gave away free “pickle pins” to visitors, which was an astounding success. In 1900, at a time when even one light bulb was something to write home about, the company put up the first electric advertising billboard in New York which was lit up with 1,200 light bulbs! The billboard itself became a tourist attraction until it was demolished to make room for the Flatiron building.

Heinz knew that it would cost too much to create a brand around all of the company’s products, and told the following story about how he conceived of the Heinz 57 varieties marketing slogan, as passed on by E.D. McCafferty, a close associate:

“Its origin was in 1896. Mr Heinz, while in an elevated railroad train in New York, saw among the car-advertising cards one about shoes with the expression ’21 Styles.’ It set him to thinking, and as he told it: ‘I said to myself, “we do not have styles of products, but we do have varieties of products.” Counting up how many we had, I counted well beyond 57, but 57″ kept coming back into my mind. Five, seven — there are so many illustrations of the psychological influence of that figure and of its alluring significance to people of all ages and races that 58 Varieties or 59 Varieties did not appeal to me as being equally strong. I got off the train immediately, went down to the lithographers, where I designed a street-car card and had it distributed throughout the United States. I myself did not realize how highly successful a slogan it was going to be.”

What Heinz managed to do was create a single corporate brand or identity, that could be applied across all its products. When consumers saw the slogan “57 Varieties” they associated it with the quality they expected from the brand. The number 57 has become so associated with Heinz that people took to using the term “Heinz 57” or “57 varieties to refer to something composed of a mishmash of many parts.

As to the “significance” of the number 57, or the numbers 5 and 7 separately, there is not any one number that an irrational and imaginary significance cannot be attached to.

The mythical origin of the “57 Varieties” didn’t stop the company and it’s advertisers from pretending that the number was inspired by an actual list of 57 products, and such lists did appear.

The Ultimate Branding Relic: Heinz 57 Sauce

While modern consumers look at the supermarket shelf and see a vast, unified wall of Heinz specialty condiments, from mustards to barbecue sauces, this diverse sauce portfolio is a relatively recent corporate evolution. In 1911, when the company first introduced “Heinz Beefsteak Sauce” (the original name for Heinz 57 Sauce), the corporate strategy was the exact opposite.

Following the food safety battles of 1906, H.J. Heinz was aggressively dismantling its sprawling multi-product empire to position itself almost exclusively as a singular master of tomato ketchup. Yet, right in the middle of this intense consolidation toward a single flagship tomato condiment, they quietly launched an orange-brown steak sauce that fundamentally contradicted their new branding identity. To defeat general canners like Del Monte, Heinz had successfully trained the public to believe that extreme thickness was the visual proof of pure, high-quality tomato density. Yet, their new steak sauce achieved its heavy, viscous texture through an old-world, fruit-heavy mash of apples and raisins.

So, while H.J. Heinz systematically cleared its inventory of canned soups and general vegetables to position itself as a dedicated tomato ketchup master, they left behind one glaring, highly successful exception to the rule: Heinz 57 Steak Sauce.

The “57 Ingredient” Legend

The psychological power of the “57” trademark was so overwhelming that it completely overrode the reality of the recipe. For generations, a widespread urban legend persisted that Heinz 57 Sauce was named because it literally contained 57 unique ingredients. In an era before strict FDA labeling laws made ingredient lists easy to decipher, consumers willingly mapped their own ideas of complexity onto the mysterious number.

The Joe DiMaggio 56-Game Disappointment

The number became so deeply embedded in the American psyche as the absolute mathematical ceiling for variety that it even crossed into high-stakes sports history. During the summer of 1896, the marketing campaign was born; forty-five years later, it collided with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio’s iconic 1941 hitting streak.

According to a persistent contemporary rumor, Heinz executives saw an opportunity for the ultimate corporate alignment. The company allegedly offered “Joltin’ Joe” a staggering $10,000 endorsement contract to become the official face of Heinz 57 Steak Sauce, under the strict condition that he extend his hitting streak to exactly 57 games.

The marketing coup seemed all but guaranteed until July 17, 1941, when the Cleveland Indians halted the Yankee Clipper’s historic run. Two spectacular, physics-defying defensive stops by Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner stranded DiMaggio at 56 games, permanently freezing the record one night short of the corporate bounty. In the aftermath of the heartbreak, dugout lore claimed a frustrated Heinz executive lamented the near-miss by declaring, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to change the name to Heinz 56 Sauce!” While the company already manufactured far more than 57 items, the panic highlighted just how rigidly protective the brand had become over its favorite numerical illusion.

The Lone Sauce that Started an Empire

Ironically, it was this lone, non-ketchup sauce that enabled Heinz to successfully become a condiment company, rather than just a ketchup company. 57 Sauce didn’t survive the corporate graveyard because it fit the company’s new tomato-centric manufacturing pipeline. It survived because it weaponized the psychological power of the trademark. By stamping the “57” directly onto a specialized steak condiment, Heinz successfully extended its aura of singular sauce mastery outside of the burger-and-fry dynamic. It allowed them to dominate the premium meat aisle using the exact same psychological umbrella that protected their flagship ketchup. When a modern consumer sees that orange-brown bottle on the supermarket shelf, they aren’t looking at a random line extension; they are looking at the last surviving relic of the sprawling, multi-product empire that H.J. Heinz systematically sacrificed to conquer the American palate.

Heinz successfully spent decades building a reputation as a hyper-focused “ketchup specialist,” while simultaneously keeping the structural footprint for a broader sauce empire warm in the background. When consumer trends shifted decades later and the company decided it was time to branch back out into mustards, specialty relishes, and barbecue sauces, they didn’t have to fight to establish themselves as a general sauce maker. The psychological groundwork had already been laid on the American dining table for a century. Nobody blinked, because the iconic “57” umbrella had silently maintained their authority over the entire condiment category all along. In fact, many consumers probably never realized they had only been selling two bottled condiment sauces all along!