It’s wise to take a cynical view of corporate do-gooding these days — the bigger the rainbow flag, the more likely it is to cover up an oil spill — but 150 years ago, things were different: No one cared if you hired a 4-year-old, or put cocaine in your health food, or if the occasional finger slipped into the chicken in the pot.
In this kind of environment Henry J. Heinz Heinz began implementing worker and consumer protections that we take for granted today in 1869. At the time, the packaged food industry was in its infancy. Without oversight or regulation, manufacturers often used dangerous “preservatives” and misleading additives (cracked cinnamon with brick dust, for example). Standard colored glass containers served to hide many defects until it was too late.
Heinz chose to use clear glass for its packaging, and later developed its iconic eight-sided ketchup bottle to allow consumers to view the product from multiple angles. This transparency was consistent with Heinz’s deep Christian faith, but it also foreshadowed the organic boom a century later. Heinz’s credo, “Protecting the Consumer by Owning the Product from Soil to Table,” would look right at home on a jar of artisanal preserved lemons purchased at a Bucks County Farmer’s Market.
As Heinz grew from a small horseradish grower into a condiment magnate, he made sure to treat his employees extremely well, providing amenities unthinkable at the time, like a cafeteria, a gym, a library, and free medical care. This benevolence was just part of Heinz’s good nature, but it also served him well as a fierce capitalist, preventing the labor disputes that plagued other companies at the time.
Heinz also used the clean working conditions in his factories as a marketing tool, devising factory tours and emphasizing that such cleanliness signaled the purity of his products. Again, doing the right thing was good for business; Heinz believed that widespread public distrust of packaged foods would be more costly in the long run than implementing quality-control measures. His support was essential to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.
