The Heinz Dip & Squeeze.

141 years ago, Henry J. Heinz founded the H. J. Heinz Company in our fair city of Pittsburgh, PA. For the first time in the last 42 of those years, Heinz is changing its iconic ketchup packet design to a new “Dip & Squeeze” container. Tear the front off, and it works just like the current packet. Tear the lid off, and it’s a container for dipping. It also holds three times the ketchup of the original. I’d love to learn that the material used in the new packet is 100% biodegradable or made from recycled water bottles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe Heinz is figuring that consumers will generate less waste by simply using fewer containers, instead of the 37 packets we’re all currently using to drown our fries. C’est la vie.

As Malcolm Gladwell reminds us all, Heinz didn’t become a global ketchup monolith by accident. They did it by innovating.

UPDATE: This, from an anonymous source close to the Dip & Squeeze’s development:

In food, innovation takes baby steps, because food consumers don’t like the totally unfamiliar. So it’s great that you appreciate this product for how innovative it really is, in that context. It might not be an iPhone, but it’s an incremental innovation, solving real problems consumers have (not enough ketchup per packet, gotta open each packet with my teeth, can’t trust my kids with the packets in the car). So glad you got it.