Ketchup is perhaps the most popular of condiments. Catsup, tomato sauce. Whatever you call it.
The first website I ever visited was about tomato ketchup, in October or November 1995. This is my tribute.
Ketchup has been around for a long time. Famously, though, people were pretty suspicious of tomatoes back then. So ketchup was mostly made with mushrooms. Of course, you can make ketchup out of lots of things. But why would you.
Ye olde ketchups.
Heinz started selling ketchup in 1876. I'm a big fan of the old-timey medicine-looking bottle of 1889-1894.
Why did I get on the internet for the first time and look up ketchup? My dad, when explaining the internet, had said there was information about anything you could think of. Even ketchup.
I'm a Heinz person myself, except for this:
In a chip shop near you.
Daddies is the chip shop ketchup. It's okay for chip shop ketchup to taste different.
The site I visited was probably about their collection. Maybe a packaging and advertising enthusiast.
This will not have been on a site from 1995...
This is a cursed bottle of ketchup.
64 oz is 1.8 litres of ketchup. That's... such a lot of ketchup. You can't use that on a table, right? You decant that? So why does it look like an actual bottle? It's terrifying.
There was a palpable handmade, real person feeling. Even the 'search engines' were real people making directories. These sites were earnest and real.
There's a technique to starting a new bottle of ketchup. Everyone in my family hands it over to me. I like a glass bottle because it recycles better.
The feeling, though I hardly appreciated it at the time, was that people did things because they cared about them.