Why do heinz have 57 varieties

The ad shows that the products originated in various countries around the world. Most of the products are still more popular abroad than in the United States. Another popular product at the exhibit is horseradish, which was the first product Heinz ever made from his family's land in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania.

He was eight years old when he thought of an innovative way to market his product: putting it in a clear jar so that customers could see that he had the whitest and purest roots in his horseradish. His first food company declared bankruptcy in , but his nearly identical HJ Heinz company became successful just a few years later.

His marketing strategy took off after he came up with the idea for his "57 varieties" slogan in the s, even as the number of products the company offered stretched into the hundreds and thousands. To promote his 57 varieties, Heinz installed the first-ever electric sign on the site where the Flatiron Building now stands in New York.

It was a foot, six-story tall image of a pickle with "57 varieties" written underneath. He put ads with a large 57 all over the place, including on an Atlantic City pier. He also put massive cement 57s on hillsides close to railroad lines so that passengers would see them during their trip. All of that effective advertising and branding led the 57 varieties to become ingrained in culture, and they have come to be a nickname for many different things.

For example, a bingo caller might say "57 varieties" when they pull out the "57" bingo ball, "57 varieties" in draw poker is when 5 and 7 are wild cards, and a mutt might be called "57 varieties" or "Heinz dogs.

The slogan has also appeared in popular culture, like in Jimmy Buffett's song "Cheeseburgers in Paradise," and both the novel and film "The Manchurian Candidate. It also helps that the campaign was launched before there was an onslaught of advertising everywhere you turned.

And then it's carried on into our modern, post-modern world, where things like that, they grow beyond their original meaning. The company, in partnership with a pickle and vinegar maker, started also selling pickles, and by the s was selling more than 60 products, including mincemeat and pepper sauce, Mikkelson writes. Most were initially suspicious of the quality and value of such products.

Three years later, he came up with the idea for his slogan on a train. It was a poignant remembrance: Heinz and Sarah Young married in and she had been an important part of building his business, but she died of pneumonia in Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto. Heinz, who founded the company in the late 19th century, was on a train one day when he spotted an ad on the side of the car which advertised "21 styles" of shoes via Smithsonian.

Though this type of advertising doesn't sound particularly groundbreaking to readers in , Heinz found it to be quite catchy and it piqued his interest. He decided that he wanted to come up with a similar ad campaign for his company which would catch people's eye the same way the shoe ad caught his. Instead of counting up the actual number of varieties his company made, Heinz decided to fudge it a little bit.