How Heinz Tomato Ketchup is made

• The dutch factory makes 1.8 million bottles of Tomato Ketchup a day.
• The factory has been making ketchup for the whole European region since 1958
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Insider visited the Heinz Tomato Ketchup factory in Elst, Netherlands, where 1.8 million is made

It's one of the world's most popular condiments, and it can be found in many households around the world. Heinz is the market leader in ketchup, selling over 650 million bottles of ketchup around the world every year.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Danielle (Traa) Process Manager: Here in Elst we make sauces for the Kraft Heinz company. Our main product is ketchup — that's 70% of what we do. We make roughly 1.8 million bottles of ketchup a day, which translates into about 175,000 tonnes of ketchup a year.

Narrator: The ketchup-making process starts here, where crates of tomato paste weighing 1,300 kilograms are transported from the Heinz warehouse using automated forklifts. The crates are opened and then go to the paste dumper, where these huge rolling pins squeeze the paste out of the package.

After the paste has been extracted, it sits in the storage bin, where it's mixed with water to give it a smoother consistency. This makes it easier to transport to this storage tank, where it will sit until moving on to the ketchup kitchen.

Danielle Traa: This is our ketchup kitchen, and this is where we actually produce the tomato ketchup. We've just seen the paste being prepared and go into the storage tank. Here in the kitchen we have an automated dosing system. Ketchup is made up of five ingredients: brine, vinegar, sugar, tomato paste, and the secret spices.

The process is mainly about heating the ketchup and cooling it down. Afterwards, we fill it up into the bottles.

The boxes with caps are emptied and transported upstairs. Upstairs we make sure the caps are in the right position and go into a single row of caps to make sure they're in the right position when they go through to the filling machine.

The empty bottles, they go into the filler. We have 70 filling heads; it's a filler that works by weight. So a bottle comes in, we check the empty weight of the bottle, we fill it to the proper weight with ketchup, and then we check again if we reached the filling weight.

After we fill the bottles with ketchup we put a capper on it, and for this bottle we have three labels, a neck label, a front label, and a back label. These labels are self-adhesive, so we don't need any glue for it. After the labeller, we go to the tray packer where we get a tray from the bottom, we put a shrink wrap around it and make sure the bottles are tight and packed in the tray so they're ready to go

Narrator: Now that we've seen how it's iconic ketchup is made, how did Heinz become the prominent brand it is today?

Heinz was founded in Pittsburgh in 1869 by a 25-year-old named Henry John Heinz, who began his business by selling his mother's horseradish recipe.

Over the years, Heinz expanded his catalogue, selling pickles, vinegar, and eventually tomato ketchup, which launched in 1876. It was a roaring success, and in 1886, the company began shipping the sauce to the UK.

Following the overwhelming popularity of Heinz ketchup, Heinz started producing 13 million bottles a year and exporting them all over the world, which explains why you're never too far from a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup.

Read the original article on Insider