15. The Waffle House Index
When a disaster hits the South, chances are the local Waffle House will be back open in no time. The 24-hour breakfast chain is so good at responding to storms that FEMA uses it to determine where to deploy disaster aid. How does Waffle House get up and running so quickly? PLUS: Customer Service takes on Heinz and the mystery of the 57 Varieties.
Produced by Dan Bobkoff, Anna Mazarakis, Amy Pedulla, and Sarah Wyman.
Read more:
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: Hurricane Florence was a weird storm. Most storms bounce off the coast and head back to sea. But when Florence arrived in mid September, it just kinda parked itself over Wilmington, North Carolina and stayed there for days.
ARCHIVAL: The rain will barely let up here on this coast for another 24 hours.
Catastrophic flooding with more than three feet of rain.
Rivers are rising today, throughout North Carolina as all this rain from Florence rushes downstream...
DB: Business Insider's Dan Brown arrived in Wilmington the day after landfall.
DAN BROWN: Uh, it looks like that streetlight is kinda… the streetlights are working now. And I see a few light poles on. But pretty much all the businesses are dark. Some are boarded up...
DB: The rain was drenching. The wind was picking up. All the businesses around him were closed, except for one beacon in the dark.
DAN BROWN: The only lights on are this Waffle House.
DB: Dan made his way past the line of people waiting for a table.
DAN BROWN: And there's about 15 people standing outside…
DB: And headed inside.
DAN BROWN: the waffle house inside is packed...
DB: It's an oasis.
WAFFLE HOUSE: Alright, Jeremy, I've got two waffles in my hand all day.
DAN BROWN: I'm smelling eggs. It's a little hint of syrup as well, I think. That's what I'm smelling. Maybe also a hint of coffee too, I can't tell.
DB: Families are jammed into booths, crowded around tables.
DAN BROWN: There's about maybe a dozen line workers and cooks and chefs behind the counter, they're all running around, cooking and frying and everything.
DB: All this is literally news during the storm.
ARCHIVAL: One restaurant was still serving up hot food today as the storm was nearly upon them. Arby's nope. Hooter's, no wings today. Thursday's saving grace, the Waffle House.
DB: But this is not a local story of a lone Waffle House braving a storm.
ARCHIVAL: The company activated a storm center to monitor Florence, which is of course now a category 2 hurricane, and that's because Waffle Houses are known for staying open through disasters.
DB: Newscasters went live to Waffle House headquarters like it was their weather center.
FOX NEWS: Waffle House spokesman Pat Warner joins us. What are you hearing right now? What does your index tell you?
PAT WARNER: Well right now, Neil, we have 230 restaurants in the storm's path. We have 17 closed...
DB: And it's not just the news using Waffle Houses to gauge a storm.
ABC NEWS: Here's something we hadn't really heard of before. The Waffle House Index. It's an actual thing.
Yeah, FEMA uses it to track storm conditions. If a Waffle House restaurant in one area is closed then the authorities know conditions there are especially bad.
DB: So I wanted to know: what's the deal with Waffle Houses and hurricanes?
From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name. Brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
Today: The Waffle House Index.
For years, FEMA has tracked Waffle House closures to help it determine where to send disaster aid. How did this old fashioned 24 hour breakfast joint become so good at recovering from disasters? Why does it have a storm center at its headquarters?
And later on, in our Customer Service segment. We'll investigate: are there really 57 varieties of Heinz? Stay with us.
ACT I
DB: Part of what makes all this so surprising is that a Waffle House does not look like the kind of place that could coordinate a sophisticated disaster response.
PW: It's a little shoebox of a restaurant. It has 40 seats top. The grill is out front and we have a high bar where folks can sit there and see their food cooked and it's really a small gathering place for the community.
DB: Pat Warner is the Waffle House PR guy the news stations called during Florence.
PW: Even though we have 2,000 restaurants, each one has its own unique personality and really they fit into whatever community that they are serving. So that's kind of the role. We have played throughout our history going back to 1955.
DB: Waffle House is a distinctly Southern American institution. Red bricks. Yellow sign. A logo that looks like it's made of Scrabble tiles.
PW: We're a 24-hour restaurant. We've been 24 hours from the start.
DB: So Waffle House is different things to different people at different times of day.
Lunchtime waffles after little league… 2am drunk hash browns for college students…. Political talk over dinner. Its biggest sales day is Christmas.
It's become like a microcosm of American culture. Where you might see celebrities.
PW: This is the best photo. It's Kim, Kanye, John, and Chrissy, all decked out in their formal gear, and they're chillin' inside of a Waffle House.
DB: ….births….
PW: ...car and delivered his baby girl in the front seat of the car. Then they drove to this Waffle House parking lot to wait for paramedics.
DB: ….shootings….
PW: ...mass shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House...
DB: ...bomb threats…
PW: ...two bomb threats that happened this morning at a waffle house on Pine Avenue in...
DB: And violent weather. Waffle House started near Atlanta, and then expanded outward from there so most of its restaurants are in the Southeast… so if there's a hurricane in the Atlantic, it's probably going to hit a Waffle House. And then after the storm, Waffle House is the place you go.
CRAIG FUGATE: I get their little breakfast steak, scrambled eggs, and hash browns covered and smothered.
DB: Sounds pretty good.
DB: This is Craig Fugate.
CF: It's good food, it's hot it's fast. Nothing pretentious about a Waffle House.
DB: Craig has spent his whole career responding to disasters. Many of them big storms in Florida. He ran emergency management for the state, and then became the head of the federal emergency management agency — FEMA — under President Obama.
Craig has never worked for Waffle House. He doesn't even go to them that often. But for years now, when there's a storm, people tell him how the local restaurant is doing.
CF: Because it became a shorthand, I guess because it was associated with me, I would get a lot of feedback during storms about people telling me the status of their Waffle Houses.
DB: That's because of something that happened in 2004.
CF: We were hit by four hurricanes, and the first of which was Hurricane Charley, which hit in August.
DB: Back then, Craig was in charge of Florida's Emergency Management Division. And Hurricane Charley was a real emergency. One of the strongest storms to ever hit the US. 150 mile per hour winds at times.
And it was part of Craig's job to drive around the disaster zone and assess how bad things were. As he was driving he kept seeing streaks of green in the ground.
CF: You kind of wonder where'd all the oranges go. And you started realizing that these green streaks you were seeing, these long streaks of green, were just green oranges up and down the road.
DB: The oranges were like shrapnel. One house had been absolutely pummeled by flying fruit, every window blown out.
After a lot of moments like that, Craig and his crew were tired. They'd been eating MREs — meals ready to eat — like they use in space shuttles or a battlefield.
CF: And we got on the interstate, and we actually had to turn south and drive south to find something open. Probably around 5 in the morning just to get something to eat because we were going to be gone all day and had no idea if we'd ever get a chance to grab a bite. As we went south, we found a Waffle House that's open.
DB: And it's in large part because of this very breakfast that we now pay so much attention to Waffle Houses in disasters. Craig went in, and the first thing that seemed a little off was the menu. It was photocopied.
CF: 'What's this?' Well, 'we lost power, we got power back, but we lost everything in the freezer so all we have is what's on this menu.'
DB: Craig was there with a guy named Tad from the National Guard and Ben, a meteorologist.
CF: I think Tad was trying to order cheese grits. And cheese grits became grits with a slab of american cheese thrown on top. It wasn't exactly what he fondly remembered as cheese grits, but...
DB: That doesn't sound good.
CF: It was what they had. You know, in a disaster you can't be too choosy about stuff. The fact that we were sitting down eating a hot meal with a roof over our head was actually a vast improvement than what most people were facing that next day.
DB: So the next day, they went to a different Waffle House.
CF: And...same deal. Mimeographed menu.
DB: But the guy cooking looked familiar.
CF: Oh yeah, it was the same guy. Yeah, it was the same cook.
DB: Same as the first restaurant.
CF: He was driving a beat up car, but he had on the back of it a bumper sticker that said WHERT. And I'm like WHERT? And it's like Waffle House Emergency Response Team. I thought it was a joke.
DB: It's at this point that Craig and his team realize Waffle House is different. This is a restaurant that really, really cares about staying open… or at least reopening as soon as possible after a disaster.
The next day, he and his team had to give a presentation about how Florida was recovering. At the last minute, they threw in a PowerPoint slide about the status of the Waffle Houses.
CF: All of this was just kind of based upon observations, kind of a little bit of humor in a slide deck, and a realization that you know this is a useful tool.
DB: And this right here is the moment the so-called Waffle House Index was born.
CF: If the Waffle House is closed, it's red. If the waffle house is open with a limited menu, it's yellow. And if the waffle house is open, it's got a full menu, it's green.
DB: Here's the thing about Waffle Houses. There are a lot of them, so you can be pretty sure there'll be one in a storm's path. And they're often on highway off ramps.
CF: And so the kind of shorthand was if you get there and the Waffle House is Open and has got a full menu, keep going, it's not that bad. If you got there and the Waffle House is on a limited menu, we've probably got power outages and a lot of impacts to the population. If you get there and it's, storm's closed the Waffle House and they're not open, that's a pretty bad area, and that's where you need to focus your search and rescue operations, your security missions and immediate life safety type activities. It was kind of an informal shorthand.
DB: It may have been informal. It may have been unconventional. But Craig and his team started using the index almost immediately in 2004.
CF: We got hit by Frances, that was basically 22 days after Charley made landfall, and then 11 days after Frances made landfall, we had Ivan hit the Pensacola region, the panhandle, and then we had Jean hit back on the southeast coast. And this is kind of how the index started getting used.
DB: He had to give a lot of presentations that year, so the team started calling them "Waffle House Briefings."
CF: In fact, when I was going through my vetting process with the White House, they had heard about the Waffle House briefings.
DB: President Obama had just taken office. After Craig's success in Florida, Obama picked him to head up FEMA.
CF: So they called me up and they said, 'hey, we need to know what your arrangement is with Waffle House. Are you on retainer? Or... what kind of compensation... do you have an agreement with them?'
DB: There was no relationship. He'd never even talked to Waffle House.
CF: I was like 'what are you talking about?'
DB: By the time of his senate confirmation hearing, it was all sorted out.
JOE LIEBERMAN: Good morning. The hearing will now come to order. Today, our committee will consider the nomination of W. Craig Fugate as FEMA administrator...
BILL NELSON: He has a homespun Florida way of describing how he handles his professional duties. He calls it the "Waffle House test".
JL: Usually around here waffling means something else. And let me say it, your opening statement, you did not waffle.
DB: That's Senate humor for you from Bill Nelson and Joe Lieberman.
CF: So when I got to FEMA, I didn't start out with the Waffle House Index, it kind of followed me.
DB: He'd get questions about it. Newspapers wrote the occasional article.
CF: But it came back up again in Joplin.
DB: In 2011, when a multiple-vortex tornado barreled through the Missouri city. The damage was widespread. Almost two hundred people died.
Right after, Craig went in to assess the damage. He noticed the Starbucks was closed. But, next door, the Waffle House was humming.
It was during his time running FEMA that Craig finally heard from Waffle House directly.
CF: And I had never met with them, never communicated with them other than frequenting restaurants during disaster response. And they, they brought their president up, their chief attorney, their CFO, and I thought, 'man, I hope they're not mad at me.' And they came in and they were just, they just wanted to meet with me and say how much they appreciated that we'd, we'd used them as their index and all this stuff. And I said 'how do you guys do this? I mean, what kind of...' because here I am with FEMA thinking what kind of command post do you have? Do you have an EOC? How do you do all this stuff? And they looked at me and said 'no, we don't do any of that stuff.'
DB: How do they do all this stuff? How do they rush into storm zones and get their restaurants up and running so fast? That's what I asked Pat Warner, the Waffle House PR guy.
PW: I've been with Waffle House for 19 years and i'm part of our storm response team.
DB: And he told me it started after Hurricane Hugo back in 1989.
PW: That's really where we saw we had to take it to a level where we're preparing more. In the past it was more of a local thing and the local operator dealt with it.
DB: Hugo covered an unusually large area, which meant it made a bigger dent in Waffle House's operations. During the storm, Waffle House headquarters apparently called up a restaurant in the path of Hugo. It was hard to get through. After a lot of trying, they got one landline connection to work so they just kept the call going the whole storm.
After that, Waffle House got serious about storm response.
PW: We have we have several different what we call jump teams. The main jump teams for us...
DB: Jump teams. These are the people who rush to the scene of a storm. It's a mix of employees from the area, plus top officials from Atlanta.
PW: Typically restaurant managers or district managers. Sometimes we'll take in some associates, some cooks. They will go in to a market right after a storm.
DB: Waffle House has detailed checklists and plans. They know how to airlift people and supplies… and they bring in generators and food as fast as possible.
It really is kind of like a command center at headquarters.
PW: Hey, sheriff, how's it going?
DB: Even days or weeks after a storm, you might find Pat talking to a local official — like he did in the middle of our interview.
PW: That's actually the sheriff of Dougherty county in Georgia. We were checking on a curfew, he was calling me back telling me they're lifting the curfew. I had to take that call, sorry.
DB: I asked him why Waffle House bothers with all of this. They could just stay closed a little longer like the other businesses.
PW: Because our folks live in that community. But I think it's made from a business decision and a lot of companies of let's just wait it out and it's a lot easier to get the insurance check then come in later and open up. For us, we take the other... Other way, that we are a private company and we think that we need to open up quickly for for the customers and our associates, so we will put the resources in place.
DB: I've thought about this a lot, and I don't think that's just corporate BS.
There are reasons why Waffle House is like this. It really does seem true that they care about their communities and workers. They don't have shareholders to worry about. And there are practical reasons. They actually own all these restaurants. They're not franchises like most fast food businesses.. They have the power to decide when and how to reopen, and they like doing it. There's adrenaline here. The staff want to be on these jump teams.
Plus, Waffle House never advertises their storm response — they don't really advertise at all. It was really newspapers and TV that ran with the idea. To the point that Waffle House now expects the media to call when there's a storm.
So how does all this work in practice? In a moment, we go back into the storm to find out. Stay with us.
ACT II
DB: We're back.
It's September 10. Waffle House officials are monitoring Hurricane Florence … four days before it makes landfall.
PW: Well, we've activated the storm center here at our headquarters in Norcross, Georgia on Monday, and we've manned it ever since to help monitor the storm...
DB: Pat Warner and a bunch of other high-ranking Waffle House officials are crowded around a long conference table at headquarters, making phone calls, eyes glued on four computer monitors, one showing a live security camera feed from the Wilmington Waffle house.
PW: We know the restaurant has power if the cameras are working but two we can also see how busy they are. Sometimes we can see is there any damage to the restaurant? So that's up on one screen. The middle screen typically…
DB: Another monitor has a color-coded map showing all the restaurants in the path of the storm.
PW: Obviously red they're closed, we can show which ones are on generator. And so that kind of gives us an overall look at the at the area as a storm's coming on. We have a service that shows the storm track and a live weather radar. So we'll have that up.
DB: The forecast has just come in, and the war room team is getting an update.
WAR ROOM AUDIO: The 2 o'clock forecast just came out, so that's big excitement….the 5 o'clock forecast? It looks like it turned some more from the two o'clock.
PW: We're reaching out to different management teams and different states to coordinate how many people they have. They're packing their bags. They're basically waiting to get the call but we go ahead and identify who will be in that first wave of jump teams. We reached out to our management team in Virginia and they started assembling their team members that will be ready to go in basically within about a 24-hour notice.
DB: The jump teams are comprised of company staff who volunteer. They charter planes across the region and organize carpools. They arrange for hotel rooms for every jump team member.
PW: So they were ready to roll in as soon as the storm came through.
NEWS: Absolutely brutality in North Carolina. There's no other word. A sobering flash-flood emergency over the northern half...
PW: And then when Florence came in... it looks like we had 20 restaurants initially that way. Closed because of power issues.
DB: Pat's actually reporting all this directly to FEMA. They have an online meeting room now where private companies can report how things are going. Whether they're open, if they can get supplies delivered… It's something Craig Fugate set up, inspired by how Waffle House and other businesses responded to storms.
And through it all, the war room isn't all serious.
PW: We have a bell in the Storm Center...
DB: When someone on the team says something funny, they ring it ..
PW: Somebody will throw out a movie line or something like that to kind of ease the tension. Like just today we were quoting Airplane, the movie. "it's bad week to give up sniffing glue…"
[CLIP FROM AIRPLANE]
PW: And so we rang the bell. Seinfeld quotes, "It's easy to take the reservation…"
CLIP FROM SEINFELD: You just don't know how to hold the reservation…
PW: But you have to have the car!" That happens a lot where we show up and the cars aren't ready. That's a quote that gets thrown around a lot when we think we have cars in places and our folks show up and they're not there.
DB: On the ground in North Carolina, the storm is wild.
The Monkey Junction store in Wilmington is on generator power, thanks to a Waffle House employee named Lindsay Westcott and the jump team she's overseeing. Her day job is running training and culture at Waffle House, but this day she's doing a little of everything.
LINDSAY WESTCOTT: I'm helping cooking, we have something called expediting, waiting on tables… right now I'm making coffee... so we can get everyone some coffee.
DB: At this moment, the Waffle House is barely above red on Craig Fugate's Index. The only thing they've served all morning is ham sandwiches.
But that's about to change.
LW: We're about to go to the limited menu. So we opened up the first hour or two, trying to get our bearings. So we have about 8 people in the back doing all the prep so we can go to a limited menu. I think we're going to in the next five minutes or so.
DB: The people working at the registers are slammed. The line is out the door. These are hungry people.
CUSTOMER 1: We heard that this was the only place open to eat. So we've been eating like crackers and granola bars the past couple of days, so it'll be good to have a nice meal.
CUSTOMER 2: You know, there's an omelette with all kinds vegetables in it. Also with hot sauce. I really want some coffee. They have good coffee.
CUSTOMER 3: Yeah, coffee! He just said the keyword. Thank you so much, man… God bless you!
DB: By this point, the restaurant is at yellow on the index.
LW: We're at a yellow. And we're looking to go to a green soon. Once we get a few more product items this weekend, we'll be able to go to green soon.
DB: Which means they'll be able to serve just about anything you'd want.
LW: We don't have have pancakes. This is a Waffle House. Yeah, no...
DB: And at this moment, at another Waffle House in the area, the company's CEO has arrived: Walt Ehmer. But Pat says you might not even notice.
PW: Because all of our name tags have first name, so they just they just known as Walt. They don't realize he's a CEO, and he's not coming in, you know with a Fanfare and an Entourage. He comes in by himself. For us that's natural, that's just how it is… part of our, we call it homegrown management.
DB: A few weeks later, the CEO would take out trash in Florida after Hurricane Michael.
PW: What we call the "dumpster dance," where he was trying to pack down garbage.
DB: When Craig Fugate got to FEMA, he tried looking at other brands in other regions. He noticed there are a whole lot of Dunkin Donuts —or Dunkins I guess as we're calling them now. But they weren't so great at reopening after storms.
So for now, the Waffle House Index is the one that counts. And when the next hurricane hits, Pat and his team will activate the storm center and the jump teams will jump, and the people will get their waffles! But not pancakes. Sir, this is a Waffle House.
Coming up! Does Heinz really have 57 varieties?
ACT III
CUSTOMER SERVICE: Thank you for calling Customer Service, where we answer all your burning questions about brands. This call may be recorded for podcast purposes.
DB: Hi, Household Name Customer Service. Can I have your name please?
MA'AYAN PLAUT: Yes, Ma'ayan Plaut.
DB: And you have a question for us, what is your question?
MP: I do so I have long been a fan of condiments and one of the ones I see the most and everywhere is ketchup, usually and only Heinz ketchup. And I've noticed that there's a Heinz 57, the number 57 has always been a question for me. What is the "57" in Heinz 57?
DB: I'm just wondering, what does it mean to be a fan of condiments?
MP: Oh man, what does it mean to be a fan of condiments? I put condiments on everything, to me a salad, sandwich, pizza, whatever isn't complete unless I can dip it in something so while I don't necessarily dip my pizza in ketchup, I do dip ketchup, or pretty much everything in ketchup.
DB: Well, I think I have someone in our headquarters here who can answer your question if you can just hold on the line please.
MP: Yes, ok.
DB: Hey, Ma'ayan?
MP: Hi, Anna.
DB: I have found someone who I think can answer your question. It's our producer, Anna Mazarakis.
AM: Hello!
MP: Hi, Anna
AM: First of all, let me say you came to the right person, Dan. Before I really started doing any research into this, I took a quiz online, like most good Millennials, to see how much I know about Heinz history, and my guesses got me a 10 out of 10 - apparently I'm a Heinz know it all, that's what the results said, and I should *relish* my knowledge and impress my friends.
DB: You just did that to make me happy, right?
AM: You love the puns.
DB: I can't ketchup with you.
AM: (laughs) BUT after recovering from that ego boost, I actually started to do some research into your question. So like any good researcher, after doing the quiz, I turned to Google and found a reliable source: it's called the Heinz History Center. Surely the ketchup museum could help me out with your question! But then I watched the news.
ARCHIVAL: You know guys it's funny, people who come from out of town think it's the ketchup museum, right? And they think they're going to the ketchup museum. No, no...
AM: Ok so it turns out the Heinz History Center is actually the Senator John Heinz History Center. But the senator was also the great grandson of the founder of the HJ Heinz Company, Henry John Heinz. So there's ketchup in his blood and there's a ketchup exhibit in his museum.
I called the exhibit's curator, Emily Ruby, and she told me that I wasn't the only one to get that confused.
EMILY RUBY: We actually had Ed Sheeran come here when he was in town because he's always loved Heinz, he has a Heinz label tattoo on his arm...
ED SHEERAN: We're going to go to the ketchup museum in Pittsburgh and I'm really, really excited about it.
ER: And so I think he was a little disappointed because I think he thought the whole building was dedicated to Heinz and Heinz ketchup.
AM: So he went through the whole exhibit and even posted a video on Instagram playing this song over clips of him looking at various bottles of ketchup.
ES: What must they think of us? They must really like ketchup.
DB: He's just like you!
AM: But anyway, that was a lot of lead up just to say the real answer to your question is that the 57 on Heinz ketchup bottles means… drumroll... nothing.
DB: Nothing? How is it nothing?
AM: Haha well it means nothing, but of course there's a story behind it, and there are a lot of people who want to guess that it means something. And it did actually start to mean something over time.
But let's start with the story about Henry John Heinz. His first food company went into bankruptcy in 1875, but his second food company - the nearly identical HJ Heinz company - was fairly successful just a few years later. Heinz wanted to keep it that way. So he's thinking about marketing plans for all of his different products.
ER: The story that is commonly told is that he's riding an elevated train in New York City. There's a date of 1892, we think it's probably closer to 1896, and he sees this trolley advertisement for 21 varieties of shoes, and he likes this idea of a number.
AM: There are a lot of guesses for why he chose the number 57. Some people say 5 was his lucky number and 7 was his wife's, so he just put them together. Maybe the 7 had religious connotations. Or maybe he just liked the way 57 looked or sounded.
ER: I had a guy come up to me at a talk and say that he knew, because his grandfather was friends with Heinz, that it was because the streets in Pittsburg at the time ended at 56 going up the river, the Allegheny River where he lived, so there's all kinds of theories out there.
DB: Wait so I just want to make this very clear: he just made up 57 varieties? It has no relation to reality at all?
AM: Just out of thin air.
DB: Oh my gosh...
BRIAN BUTKO: The mystique becomes more important than the actual meaning.
AM: That's Emily's colleague at the History Center, Brian Butko. So as I said, 57 means nothing.
DB: But maybe it means everything?
AM: Or *almost* everything. Because the one thing the 57 definitely does not mean is the actual number of varieties, or products, the company offered at the time. When Heinz came up with the number 57, he already had more than 60 products on his shelf.
DB: Wait what?
BB: The sound and look of it meant more to him than the actual number. And that's the difference between a company that thinks they're bragging by saying oh we have 157 and an innovator who sees the value in the sound and look of something easily graspable.
AM: And the number 57 has stuck around even as that number of Heinz varieties has reached into the hundreds and thousands.
So one of the things that I think is funny, though, is like you Ma'ayan, that when I think of Heinz today, I only think of ketchup. It's my go-to for hot dogs and hamburgers. I know there are other products, but I don't really think about what those products are because the only product I consume is ketchup.
So in diving into the 57 varieties, I was intrigued to find out what the other 56 varieties allegedly are. Thankfully, I found this one ad from 1924. It shows a map of the world with lines showing where the 57 varieties originated, and it includes a list of the 57 varieties in a teeny tiny font. Very small. I had to zoom in on it.
DB: Wait so, he made up 57, but then they started actually making lists of 57 products to fit into his fake number?
AM: I guess they chose their favorites of the products that they had to put onto this advertisement? But yeah that list is just a random list.
DB: You really can't trust anyone, can you?
AM: Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that tomato ketchup is listed as number 48 on the list, with prepared mustard right behind it at 49. Number one on the list is baked beans with pork and tomato sauce, number 57 is tarragon vinegar. The rest of the products are varieties of preserves and jellies and pickles and gherkins and vinegars and soups and pastas. I've never seen most of these products at the supermarket I go to in New York.
BB: In the exhibit, some of the most popular products are the ones that we don't have here in the United States but are sold in Europe.
DB: Yeah when I go visit family in England, I'm always amazed at how many Heinz products there are on the shelves in England that don't exist in the US and I think the weirdest one to me is salad cream? Which looks like somebody combined salad dressing with mayonnaise because I think that is what it is? Maybe that's just not popular here in the US.
AM: Another thing people love to see at this exhibit is of course the horseradish, the Heinz horseradish, which was the first product Heinz ever made from his family's land in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania. He was eight years old and he already knew how to market the product: he put it in a clear jar so customers could see that he had the whitest and purest roots in his horseradish. This was innovative at the time.
His marketing schemes only got better from there, and most of them after 1896, that year that he was in that trolley in New York, included the number 57. The first electronic sign in New York was a 43-foot, 6 story tall pickle where the Flatiron building is now with "57 varieties" written underneath.
DB: Aren't you glad you called customer service, Ma'ayan?
MP: I am so happy I called customer service because the idea of a 6 story tall pickle is potentially my dream like ketchup is fine but pickles are like 20 steps above that.
DB: Literally!
AM: Or 6 stories...
He put an ad with a large 57 on an Atlantic City pier. He put these massive cement 57s on hillsides close to railroad lines.
BB: I like the story behind the giant concrete letters that he was ok if people didn't - in the community didn't like it because then he would turn that to an opportunity and rush in and apologize and make up for it and become a hero to the community, whereas again, a typical company would either bend and go away embarrassed or they'd fight it, but he knew quite well that everything is an opportunity to promote your business and so if the concrete letters stay, great. If they complain about them, that's just as well.
ER: So it wasn't just on the products, it was all on the advertising, all over the bottling, and his salesmen would use that pitch, too, when they would go out, "57 varieties of good things," that kind of thing.
AM: All of that effective advertising and branding led the 57 varieties to become ingrained in culture and give it a greater meaning. So it's kind of like what you said before: 57 kinda means everything?
Like you might get corrected if you're new at calling out numbers in bingo of all things and you just say the number 57...
TAPE: "57" "Heinz beans." "Heinz beans?" "Yeah, Heinz 57 varieties"
AM: Or if you're starring in the movie, The Manchurian Candidate, and need to think of how many people to accuse of being a communist...You might look at the Heinz ketchup you're pouring onto your food and have a brain wave in the next scene...
MOVIE CLIP: There are exactly fifty-seven card-carrying members of the Communist party in the Department of Defense at this time!
AM: Or if you want to write a song about your love of cheeseburgers, like Jimmy Buffett in Cheeseburgers in Paradise...
SONG CLIP: I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
AM: There are so many ways Heinz 57 has pushed its way into our lives.
ER: I just learned one recently: I didn't realize that mutts were called 57 varieties, or Heinz dogs. Have you heard that?
BB: No I haven't.
ER: I just learned this, so that was a new one I just learned.
DB: Please do not call dogs "Heinz dogs," it's just a little too close to hot dogs.
AM: The list goes on and on and on.
DB: Why do you think that number, this random number that he came up with, why do you think that has actually become a part of our culture?
AM: Well I think it definitely helps that it's a very simple number and a very simple concept. Whether its meaning is real or not, it's an easy and straightforward advertising campaign.
BB: And it was at a time when there wasn't the onslaught of advertising. Now, we all run screaming from advertising that's everything from the floor of a supermarket to the ice of a hockey rink, electronic billboards, but at the time, his advertising was innovative, so even if it was everywhere, it never pushed the point where people had too much of it. And then it's carried on into our modern, post-modern world, where things like that, they grow beyond their original meaning.
AM: That was Emily Ruby and Brian Butko from the Heinz History Center in Pittsburg. They're working on a book about Heinz together that they're hoping to peg to the company's 150th anniversary next year.
DB: Shouldn't it be the 157th anniversary?
AM: Good ones!
DB: Alright so Ma'ayan, are you satisfied with the service you received today?
MP: I am and part of me wishes I knew the Heinz brand was so much more than ketchup before I asked this question because the number itself is kind of insignificant but all of the things they made, it's so much more interesting to me in terms of all of the stuff that they did product development-wise. I am realizing that part of the reason I'm so obsessed with condiments I should have said in the first question which is why I'm like hedging right now, which is that my parents ran a condiments business when I was a kid so I have condiments in my blood in the way that we talked about it earlier that Heinz did. So I was one of their product testers when I was a kid and I liked all of their pickled stuff best so...
AM: What a dream to be a product tester.
DB: Well thank you for calling customer service.
MP: Yes of course! Thank you so much for this illuminating answer.
DB: And if you have another question in the future, don't hesitate to give us a call at 7313-BRANDS, or you can email us at householdname@businessinsider.com.
CREDITS
DB: And hey you know the drill: don't forget to leave us a review and rating on Apple podcasts — five stars would be nice. It really helps new listeners find the show.
Household Name is produced by Amy Pedulla, Sarah Wyman, Anna Mazarakis and me.
Our editor is Gianna Palmer.
We had help from Kevin Reilly, Dan Brown, and Kathleen Quillian.
Sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore.
The executive producers are Chris Bannon, Laura Meyer, Jenny Radelet, and me.
Household Name is a production of Insider Audio.