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s tomato sauce became a mainstay of the kitchen shelf in urban homes, the ketchup wars also heated up on newly liberalised satellite television. Marketers latched on to two things to pursue in their advertising: children, and the idea of weird, new, outlandish food habits.
Many “90s kids” may remember one particular advertisem*nt from Kissan, featuring a frequently ridiculed breakfast food. Dismayed at the sight of rava upma on the kitchen counter, a young boy slathers his food with tomato sauce “Just lagao, kuch bhi khao,” the boy says gleefully to his mother. Slather it on, eat it all.
This was a formula that seemed to work. Stories about ketchup tend to take on a life of their own. While searching for purveyors of quirky ketchup combinations, I learned of a pair of sisters who dolloped ketchup onto slices of bread with kara boondi; folks who added generous amounts of tomato sauce to curd rice; still others who just licked it straight off their hands.
Independent consultant Geetu Gidwani Verma, who previously served as executive director for food and refreshments at Hindustan Unilever, told me about a cousin who, as a child, would only eat vegetables with a topping of ketchup. “His mom would say, ‘I keep ketchup, because that's my way to get him to eat,’” she said. “And truth be told, there is something about ketchup that makes food exciting.”
Ketchup advertisers had found a sharp and deeply modern understanding of its place in the Indian palate. The night before we spoke, the 18-year-old son of communications professional Karthik Srinivasan added a side of ketchup to his dosa dinner. “My wife and I try to dissuade him and ask him to use things like chutney or molaga podi, but he refuses,” he said. “All those images of people dunking a samosa or cutlet or French fries into tomato ketchup have endured.”
Akshay Samel, associate vice-president of creative agency The Minimalist, told me that the messaging used by brands remains fairly consistent. “The communication template is, ‘it’s natural,’ and the second is that, ‘it’s tasty.’” There is also a third template, one which Nestlé’s memorable campaigns for Maggi tomato ketchup made their own. Maggi’s spotlight was on flavour. As the versatile actor Jaaved Jaaferi sampled servings of ketchup in prison, as a politician, as a tennis spectator and even as characters Quick Gun Murugun and Munna Bhai M.B.B.S., he repeated a catchphrase that drove home the point Nestlé’s marketing professionals had worked so hard to make: “It’s different.”
For more than three decades now, ketchup brands in India have relied on portraying how tomato sauce can be slipped into ordinary cooking and eating routines. And with Kissan, the focus has remained on the dynamics of a parent-child relationship, or, more specifically, a frustrated mother attempting to get her young child to eat lunch.
In some ads, children in a classroom excitedly open lunchboxes, and whoever has sabzi tossed with ketchup in their roti roll wins the day. One commercial featuring actor Juhi Chawla shows a child attempting to feed slices of tomato to his dog rather than eat it himself. Chawla suggests adding Kissan’s ketchup with “100 percent real tomatoes” to his sandwich. As far as Kissan was concerned, parents were spending the money but the younger members of the household were calling the shots.
Volfarm’s “kaddu nahi zara” commercial was an early precursor to the “100 percent real tomatoes” ads of later years, Srinivasan said. “They were selling something that was relatively less known in India, and using that kind of media spending in those early days of television. It was quite amazing in terms of the kind of behavioural change they were attempting.”
Indian-made ketchups may rely on “real tomatoes” for their messaging, but they are well-known for using preservatives and stabilisers. On the label of a ketchup bottle, once you get past recognisable ingredients such as water, tomato paste, sugar and salt, you’ll often find terms like “acidity regulator,” “stabiliser” and “preservative.”
Swetha Sivakumar, who analyses brands and their ingredients on her blog UpgradeMyFood, has found that a significant number of ketchups made in India contain the preservative sodium benzoate, along with stabilisers such as Xanthan gum and Acetylated Distarch Adipate.
For the ketchup to be shelf-stable, manufacturers use acidity regulators like acetic acid. Sivakumar noted that ketchup brands that eschew preservatives, such as Heinz (whose formula famously forgoes sodium benzoate), tend to be thicker than Indian-made ketchups, which are more liquidy in texture.
