Heinz and IHOP to Corner Shops
Just a quick note from the road….
This month I am enjoying a much needed vacation in beautiful British Columbia, Canada where I have just spent several days on Vancouver Island. While in Victoria, I made a point to keep an eye out for things Brown Sauce. Why here? As the name would suggest, Victoria is as about as British as a Canadian city gets, which as it turns out, is not very British at all. Still, Victoria is a lovely little city with a beautiful harbour, great people and a nice little “English Sweet Shop” on 738 Yates St. This little shop was abundant with every conceivable English sweet one could imagine, and nestled in the rear of the shop was a small grocery section with 6 unassuming bottles of Birmingham made HP Sauce which I promptly scouped up and deposited next to the till where I proudly announced “I’m buying out your HP Sauce!”. Seeing this from near the front of the store, my wife rolled her eyes and said “..he has a thing for HP Sauce.”. “You don’t say!” came the reply from the woman attending the counter. 
This was indeed a nice find. Apparently word of what Heinz has done with the brand hasn’t yet reached Canada’s west coast. Later I managed to find a bottle of HP Fruity (unavailable for quite some time now) and two bottles of HP Mild Curry at Salty’s Fish & Chips on Douglas St. If I continue to come across finds like this, we’ll run out of room in the car for the journey home…
Today we stopped in an IHOP (International House of Pancakes) restaurant in Richmond. We ended up at IHOP purely out of convenience and it was my first (and most likely last) encounter with this particular restaurant chain. I only highlight this particular experience as it has an unlikely Brown Sauce encounter.
Upon entering the restaurant, I quickly noted how each table had their own bottle of HP Sauce. At first I found this somewhat curious. This is one of the very few occasions where I’ve come across where HP Sauce is served by default without requiring one to ask for it. What makes this particularly notable is that this restaurant chain is little more than a fast food outlet where one can wolf down huge breakfast portions served to your table in less than 5 minutes, all for less then $9.99. Its disgusting really, its no wonder todays society is struggling with obesity with the likes of IHOP (and countless other chains just like it) around.
The waitress which presented the condiments to our table made a point of delivering it alongside Heinz tomato ketchup where she said “Here is your ketchup and sauce for bacon. Okay?”. Erm…okay!
The bottle she presented us was subtly different than the one I used in “Heinz and the HP Sauce brand in 2007 - A Consumers Perspective“. Although the exact address now escapes me, this bottle was clearly Canadian produced with no New Jersey, USA reference. The bottle too had also changed. Along with the new, narrow labels the bottle itself is now an opaque brown! I am referring of course to the regular format plastic squeezy variety. It is unclear to me whether this is an attempt at hiding Heinz’s watered down version of HP Sauce, or to fall in line with the other Heinz brands which also have opaque bottles. Still, like the sauce contained within, the solid brown colour bottle just doesn’t “fit” the brand. Not a drop made it onto my plate.
What I think is entirely likely here is that now that Heinz owns the HP Sauce brand, they will try to grow its market share and they will use their considerable resources to flog it along side their more established (we’re talking North America here) brands like tomato ketchup. What’s wrong with this picture? It should be obvious by now - Heinz has changed the recipe thus cheapening the entire brand in the process…only now they can hide it better in an opaque bottle. It’s a pity the English Sweet Shop didn’t also carry Branston Brown Sauce (I did ask) for I would have bought up every last bottle of it as well.
July 28th, 2007 19:08
It is sad to see Heinz buy out HP, presumably because they had a good product well known and liked, and then proceed to change it. This has happened on a number of occasions and the reasoning remains elusive. Happy you were able to find a few remaining original bottles.
I was a bit distressed, however, that you would malign IHOP for the dasterdly deed of producting too much food for your money. You cite their actions as the source of obesity. I must assume that you were forced to consume the entire contents of your plate before being permitted leave from the resturant. If true I would side with you in this matter.
But I suspect that the truth of the matter is that what you intended to say was that providing large quantities of good food at reasonable prices reflected society’s transgression of gluttony. The difference here is that the burden of sin lies with the one holding the fork rather than the one providing it.