Vintage Heinz Ketchup Mascot Mini Puzzle 🍅 20-Piece Buzzy Brands Toronto NOS, Brings Nostalgic Fun Home

Why Does Heinz Say 57 Varieties? 🍅 A Vintage Heinz Ketchup Mascot Mini Jigsaw Puzzle, 20 Pieces, Buzzy Brands, Toronto, Sealed

Size: 4 3/4" x 4"

A little 20-piece puzzle of a plush Heinz ketchup bottle with a face, arms and sneakers, sitting on a wrought-iron bench like he's waiting for a bus, with HEINZ TOMATO KETCHUP and 57 VARIETIES across his label. It's die-cut card on gray chipboard, sealed in its clear bag, and the bag reads FABRIQUE EN CHINE POUR / MADE IN CHINA FOR / BUZZY BRANDS / BOX 1738 / 5334 YONGE ST. / TORONTO, ON / M2N 6V1, with the warning NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 3 YEAR OF AGE in English and French. These have never been opened.

🍅 57 Varieties

Henry J. Heinz started out bottling horseradish in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania in 1869, under the name Heinz Noble & Company. That business went bankrupt in 1875, and the very next year he started over as F. & J. Heinz with his brother John and his cousin Frederick - and that's the outfit that put out the ketchup in 1876. By 1888 Henry had bought out both partners and renamed it the H. J. Heinz Company.

The 57 is a story Heinz has told for over a century: riding a New York elevated train in the 1890s, Henry saw a shoe-store sign advertising 21 styles, liked the ring of a number, picked 57 because he liked the sound of it - the company was already making more than 57 products - and put it on everything starting in 1896. Four years later New York got a Heinz electric sign six stories tall, 1,200 light bulbs, with a giant green pickle on top flashing the 57 Varieties.

🥒 A man who loved a giveaway

Heinz always knew a freebie could make a friend. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago his booth got stuck up on the second-floor gallery of the Agricultural Building, where hardly anybody wandered, so he had local boys scatter little white tokens all over the fairgrounds - bring one up to the booth for a free souvenir. People came, sampled, and walked off with a green pickle pin, about a million of them by the end of the fair. The legend goes the first-floor exhibitors sued him for unfair competition while the second-floor vendors threw him a dinner. Heinz kept giving pins away on its own Atlantic City pier from 1898 for nearly half a century, and by 2000 the pickle had a cousin - a red ketchup-bottle pin, about a million of them. Henry himself led the lobbying for the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and died in Pittsburgh in 1919, at 74.

🍁 Made for Canada

Buzzy Brands of Toronto had these made in China for the Canadian market, which is why everything on the bag is in English and French. The six-character postal code, M2N 6V1, is a North York address, and those codes only came in when Canada Post rolled them out in the early 1970s, so the puzzle is no older than that. Heinz had deep roots up there - its first Canadian plant opened in Leamington, Ontario in 1909 and made ketchup until June 2014. Yonge Street itself was famous for decades as the longest street in the world in the record books - Guinness carried it from 1977 to 1999 by counting Highway 11 along with it. The same smiling ketchup-bottle plush turns up as a Heinz promotional toy with a tag made for Heinz U.S.A. by The Ad Gap Group.

🧩 About the puzzle

Jigsaw puzzles go back to the 1760s, when London mapmaker John Spilsbury glued a map to wood and cut it up to teach geography. This one's 4 3/4 by 4 inches and twenty pieces, four across and five down, an easy five-minute smile - and it's still sealed in its bag. It's a fun one for a Heinz collector, a kitchen shelf next to the ketchup, or a stocking stuffer. The supply is finite - nobody's making these little Heinz puzzles anymore, and once these last sealed ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.