Heinz Canada is Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. No matter how you squirt it, Canadians love their ketchup. In fact, we Canadians have the second highest per capita consumption of ketchup in the world, second only to Finland and ahead of the US.
On average Canadians in home consumption is 1.4L of ketchup each year! While we use ketchup predominantly as a condiment, more than a third of our ketchup is used in recipes such as Shepherd’s Pie, Meatloaf, and Sloppy Joes.
Heinz, with more than an 80 per cent share of the ketchup market in Canada, produces over 31 million bottles of ketchup every year for Canadians, using more than 250,000 tons of tomatoes grown locally near its southwestern Ontario plant – the second largest Heinz plant in the world.
Ketchup trivia
• Eastern Europeans eat ketchup on their pizza while in Sweden people eat it with pasta.
• Ketsiap, as it was known, was first used in China and was made from spiced fish.
• More than 7,500 truckloads of tomatoes are harvested and delivered within a 60-mile radius of the Heinz plant where they are used to make ketchup, tomato juice, chili sauce, BBQ sauce, canned pasta, and beans and more.
• 48 local growers process tomatoes for Heinz Canada, accounting for 45 per cent of Canada’s commercial tomato crop.
