Heinz, Henry J.

Heinz started work at the age of 8 in his father’s brickyard in Pennsylvania. He also helped cultivate the family garden and sell its produce. When he was 12 he had 3.5 acres (1.5 hectares) and a horse and cart and began to learn bookkeeping. The family horseradish patch provided his first convenience food; his horseradish was offered for sale, scrubbed and scraped or grated in vinegar, in clear glass bottles which revealed the purity of the product. He remembered this when evolving his eight ‘Important Ideas’, one of which was that housewives would pay someone to take over tedious kitchen work, while another held that a pure article of superior quality, properly packaged and promoted, would find a ready market on its merit.