Why does it say 57 on heinz

Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto. Heinz started a condiment empire. His savvy marketing helped. Henry Heinz gave away pickle-shaped charms like these at his booth at the World's Fair to draw visitors. It worked. It's pretty common knowledge that the number represents the variety of products Heinz has; although, it is a little known fact that in the beginning, Henry Heinz simply used 57 because he thought it was a lucky number. Since then, the slogan '57 varieties' has stuck.

However, this is not the only interesting thing about the '57'. The number is actually strategically placed on the glass bottles of red sauce. Although most us won't buy the glass bottles anymore, we'll probably still use them at restaurants from time to time. And when we do have to use them, fuck me, it doesn't half turn into a struggle to get some of the sauce out of the bottle. 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.