In 1905, just one hundred years ago, the Henry J. Heinz Company was incorporated in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Henry Heinz became America’s chief processor and producer of foods that still nourish us and that we still enjoy. But that is just part of the story.
Henry Heinz was born in Pittsburgh’s Birmington section, the oldest of eight children, to a Henry and Margaretha Heinz. He spent his childhood years growing up in Sharpsburg, Pa. After business school, he became a bookkeeper in his father’s brickyard and became a partner. He carried on his concern for bricks and brick laying for the rest of his life. However, during this time he also began a lifelong love of gardening and peddling produce from the family’s garden. The business expanded — its horseradish product selling especially well. he public enjoyed its taste. After early financial troubles, he and relatives started the H.J. Heinz Company, inventing the “fifty-seven varieties” slogan by which the company has been identified ever since.
Heinz married Sarah Young in 1869 and the couple had five children along the way. As Germans, the Heinzes started out in the Lutheran denomination. After other temporary choices, they finally ended up in the Presbyterian family with an ecumenical attitude. During this pilgrimage, Heinz considered studying for the ministry as his career. However, given his gardening interests, he settled on a calling of providing people healthy food — along with the Gospel, of course. More of that later.
During his professional lifetime he developed several guiding ideas. First, housewives are willing to pay to be relieved from tedious kitchen work. So Heinz prepared, as his second idea, packages of pure (for the age) food and promoted superior products for his housewife market. Next, he decided to improve produce first in the ground where it grew and insured its superiority. Fourthly, he concluded that he would embrace the world as his market beginning with Europe. He also visited and supplied markets around the world. Furthermore, as he grew richer he implemented his fifth idea. He realized he had to humanize his business and treat his employees better. He even gave women key positions in the process. Sixthly, he determined to produce products that the public would not only buy but promote as satisfied customers — in other words, blow the Heinz horn.
Heinz adopted a seventh idea. He promoted the cause of pure foods, a cause that was taking off during his years. Upton Sinclair, the novelist, exposed the food industry’s revolting conditions in the Chicago stockyards in The Jungle (1906), which was widely read, and multiplied the disgust of the public. Since Heinz knew of these conditions, he stepped into the battle to help the food industry clean up its place in the kitchen and dining room.
He was dedicated to a noble purpose. He was also programmatic, knowing the cause would multiply sales. He was in his element working with county, state, and federal regulation of production, labeling, and the sale of processed foods. Along the way he cooperated with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt in that cause. And he used the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 for the cause of making the food industry produce pure foods.
He was ahead of his time in employee relations. Women held positions of larger responsibilities in his business, including making them supervisors. He promoted a company magazine entitled Pickles in which he and his workers could exchange ideas. He also welcomed visitors to his plants, thus adding to public approval and the good reputation of the “Pickle King” as the very model of a modern “Social Gospeler.” He gained a reputation for enhancing the working and living conditions of his workers. He did live, however, in a great mansion among the “lords of Pittsburgh,” who were often criticized for the poverty surrounding them in the city.
The “Pickle King” was noted for the other interest of his life. A handsome man with a handlebar mustache, he was a dedicated Christian and Presbyterian. He was deeply involved in the promotion of the Sunday School in Pittsburgh and around the world as well as his “57 Varieties.” Along with capitalist John Wanamaker of Philadelphia, he was a leader in the World Sunday School Movement, even engaging a “Sunday School secretary” to help him with his duties as he traveled to Europe and around the world to visit centers of Christian education and promote the cause.
In these activities and travels he rubbed elbows with Andrew Carnegie, another Pittsburgh Sunday school supporter. Carnegie, by the way, may have influenced his friend by his essay on the “Gospel of Wealth” in which he argued that people who made money should employ it for the good of all as suggested in Christ’s teachings.
It should be noted that Heinz is memorialized in a stained glass window in the chapel of the East Liberty Presbyterian Church, under the words: “In recognition of his faith in God through Jesus Christ and in memory of H.J Heinz, 1844-1919.”
See Robert C. Alberts’, The Good Provider, H.J. Heinz and His 57 Varieties (1973).
James H. Smylie is Professor Emeritus of Union-PSCE in Richmond, Va.
