Buoyed by its breakout success of EZ Squirt green and red ketchup for kids, H.J. Heinz Co. has begun shipping three new Asian sauces to grocery and club stores nationwide under the brand name Mr. Yoshida's Fine Sauces.
The Mr. Yoshida's rollout will be followed soon by Heinz's introduction of a three-variety line of grilling sauces under the Jack Daniels brand name.
Together with a soon-to-be-completed $195 million deal to buy the pickle and Open Pit barbecue sauce business of Vlasic Foods International Inc., plus an expansion of its Boston Market gravy line, Heinz is launching a frontal assault on the condiment and sauces aisle in supermarkets, where its ketchup already reigns supreme.
The new products are key to Heinz's growth strategy, which focuses on meeting the needs of time-starved consumers - by adding flavor, versatility and convenience for those who want to prepare a tasty home-cooked meal, but with as few ingredients and preparation steps as possible.
'We are creating a portfolio of brands that meet consumers' needs,' said Kristen C. Clark, the Pittsburgh-based brand manager for Mr. Yoshida's. 'It's versatile in that you can take a flavor that you love and bring it to the foods that you love.'
Heinz has cut steps in its own product development process with Mr. Yoshida's sauces by acquiring a brand that has built a loyal following in the Northwest over nearly 20 years.
'We're essentially expanding a proven test market,' said Brian T. Hansberry, vice president of marketing for ketchup, condiments and sauces.
Junki Yoshida is a Japanese immigrant who built a $20 million-a-year business from scratch in a way that Heinz founder Henry John Heinz would have respected. Heinz began his career hawking his mother's grated horseradish bottled in a clear glass jar.
It's Yoshida's yearning now for every American refrigerator to have a bottle of Mr. Yoshida's next to the bottle of Heinz ketchup.
Yoshida arrived in Seattle from Kyoto, Japan, in 1968, the last of seven children of a poor family. He washed dishes and worked as a gardener for low wages for several years while he learned English and made friends through his gregarious personality.
After meeting and marrying an Irish-American girl in 1974, Yoshida moved to Oregon where he taught martial arts. As a sideline, he brewed batches of his grandmother's gourmet sauce, blending the taste of mirin, a spiced sake, with other flavors, to give as Christmas gifts to his students.
When they continually requested more sauce, Yoshida and his wife, Linda, set up a kitchen in the basement of their small karate school. With the help of $160,000 from his father-in-law, who cashed in his United Airlines pension, Yoshida Foods was born.
Yoshida sold his sauce wherever he could, putting on cooking demonstrations in supermarkets and warehouse club stores. Company lore has it that he would follow people to their cars to convince them to try his sauce.
His determination paid off when Costco, a discount club store chain, made Yoshida's sauce one of the debut products in its original Seattle store.
Yoshida now presides over Yoshida Group, a holding company with more than $100 million in annual revenue. It includes an air freight company, a winery and companies that manufacture board games and snow boards.
Yoshida's personality has been ingrained with his sauces, so Heinz bought both. He has dressed in an Elvis jumpsuit and other outlandish outfits in past commercials. Heinz plans to put its marketing muscle to work to make him a national pop icon.
'Mr. Yoshida is the brand. That's what makes it special,' Clark said.
He will tour the country as part of Heinz's sponsorship of the Food Network Live! cable television show. He will also do a mobile sampling tour in 11 cities where he will whip up recipes with his sauces as he did in his early days.
Hansberry said the early trade acceptance of Mr. Yoshida's has been phenomenal, with nearly 100 percent of grocers placing orders for the three varieties - Original Gourmet, Hawaiian Sweet & Sour and Cracked Pepper and Garlic.
He said it normally takes six months or more after a product is introduced for the vast majority of Heinz's customers to take delivery of the product. But on the heels of green ketchup, Heinz's stock is up.
'I'm very bullish on this product,' Hansberry said, indicating that Heinz is already experimenting with new varieties even before the original ones have received wide distribution.
Hansberry said there is always concern when introducing new products into the same category that the result may just be to shift sales from one of a company's products to another. But if done properly, he said, each product will connect with a targeted consumer, and the category will grow as a whole.
He pointed to Heinz's experience with gravies. When the company launched Boston Market brand gravies last year, they competed directly with Heinz's own brands.
'While we have seen that some consumers merely shifted from Heinz to Boston Market, overall gravy sales have increased,' he said.
Hansberry hopes to duplicate that phenomenon in sauces and with Heinz and Vlasic pickles.
'I think you will find that the flavor and taste profile of the Open Pit customer will be very different than the one for Jack Daniels,' he said.
These are heady days for Heinz marketers, Hansberry said. Chairman William R. Johnson has given his executives latitude to innovate and authority to spend to do the market research and product promotion that had lagged near the end of the tenure of former Heinz Chairman Anthony J.F. O'Reilly.
The effort is showing dividends with Heinz ketchup sales, which had dropped below 50 percent market share three years ago, achieving a record 63 percent share in the last rating period.
