Why America’s Fridges Are Overflowing With Sauce
The pandemic is over, but households are still stocked up on fancy ketchups and chili crisp like the world could end tomorrow.
Photo Illustration: Rui Pu for Bloomberg Businessweek; Photos: Shutterstock (6)
When President Barack Obama entered a popular Virginia restaurant in the spring of 2009 and ordered a burger with Dijon mustard—hold the ketchup—American right-wing media went wild. “Plain old ketchup didn’t quite cut it for the president,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said in a segment titled “President Poupon.” Others dubbed the incident “Dijongate.” One blogger even claimed MSNBC had deceptively edited out Obama’s condiment order when it aired the clip to help maintain the president’s “man of the people” reputation.
In many ways, 2009 was a simpler time—before MAGA, TikTok, the pandemic. It was also a simpler time for condiments, which remained an afterthought in many households beyond the basics. In 2010, Heinz was still so synonymous with ketchup that when an upstart came around offering its own version, it was considered adorably, audaciously naive. “Those little artisanal condiment makers keep trying to unseat Heinz, to no avail,” a New York Times reviewer wrote about Sir Kensington’s ketchup, which came in both spicy and classic. (It never did unseat Heinz, even after big-food maker Unilever Plc bought the brand in 2017.)