First off, he's The Ketchup Man to you. We can settle on Larry. While Ketchup World was founded in 2000, the seeds were first planted in 1983, when he got his hands on a copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook. It was a breakthrough moment for Larry to expand his understanding of available ingredients and styles of cooking outside euro-centric American cooking, and contemplate that perhaps there was more out there than what was stocked on grocery shelves of Philadelphia's suburbs. Soon after, he found a recipe for ketchup in a book and looked into having someone make it so that he could produce and sell it...that never happened nor did he try making it himself.

Fast forward 16 years, two kids and an high-speed internet connection later, when the notion of shopping on the internet was relatively new and there were mono-product sites like pettoys.com for pet toys or cars.com for cars or amazon.com for books, Larry came back to ketchup. Deciding between salt, razor blades, and ketchup, he chose the condiment as his product and the industry he wanted to disrupt (he has no regrets by the way). The energy around starting a retail driven website in 1999 was exciting and unknown. There were these horror stories of people starting small e-commerce ventures and would be so inundated with orders and traffic overnight that their sites would crash or have significant profit losses due to being so overwhelmed by fulfillment delays. When Ketchup World went live in 2000, Larry held his breath...he went to bed with a lump in his chest, excited to wake up like it was Christmas morning...and when he woke up he realized 1. We are Jewish and 2. He had about 2 orders.

For the next 6 years, Larry worked to expand his offerings and travelled to specialty food shows to share his experience of what living a life in a non-Heinz world looked like. Ketchup World also became a space for him to exercise his love for satire. He once noted in the product copy for a bottle of Organic Roasted Garlic Ketchup that it was a "NASA favorite and the first Ketchup to land on the moon," he soon received a cease and desist letter from NASA. He referred to Ketchup World HQ (which in reality existed in our basement and in our carriage house located in the backyard, formerly occupied by my grandparents) as "Ketchup World Towers--the tallest buildings in the tri-state area with 360 degree views of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania." One day he received a call from a restaurateur in Singapore with the desire to visit Ketchup World Towers, he unfortunately had to decline and explain that KW HQ was actually split between subterranean space and two-story home. Keeping the family involved in Ketchup World was also important. So much so he once forged a copy of my brother's birth certificate so that he could work the booth at a food show. He kept his day job as an English professor and worked with a handful of restaurants, hotels, events to fulfill their gourmet ketchup needs.

This is a sore subject, but because I love each and every one of you who subjects themselves to this site, so I will share. The original Ketchup World was a full on dot com site, sold twice. In my search for an available and appropriate domain name I landed on .net, yet entirely frustrated that Ketchupworld.com was a blank page, ketchup-less, and excluded from the Bailis-family estate. I did some research, and one day found the phone number and a PO Box located in New Jersey that was associated with the current owner. I cold called, not expecting anyone to answer at 7pm on a Monday and shockingly I someone picked up. “Hi, this is sort of insane, I just found this phone number…but do you own Ketchupworld.com?”

The man on the other line was fairly shocked and explained that, yes he was the current and rightful owner of Ketchupworld.com. He asked me why I was calling and I explained “Well, so the thing is…I am the second generation of Ketchup World, you see my dad was the original founder and I’m looking to…umm..sort of start it again” He laughed and explained that he and his wife ran the site for a few years and grew tired of it, they now run an ATM distribution company, but kept the domain name because it was funny and “still gets a decent amount of traffic.” I then explained that those spikes in traffic were probably me checking in every few months to see if the site was gone or not.

We started to talk about how the business was operational for him and he rattled off his best sellers as well as asserting the fact he had a repeat “celebrity customer.” I demanded for him to reveal the identity of this customer, who apparently ordered an entire case (that would be 16 bottles) of hot n’ spicy ketchup every 30 days. He replied and divulged that it was fellow Jewess, Tori Spelling.

Our correspondence ended when he followed up to our phone call with an email letting me know “I’m open to an offer, I haven’t done any market research on it.” I let him know that the site holds mostly sentimental value and I too don’t know the market value of Ketchupworld.com and I’d like to bring it back into my family. He never replied.

Great question, honestly until a few months ago tomatoes gave me horrific acid reflux, so I sort of stayed away from all tomato-related things, which was sad and left me really longing for that sweet and vinegary taste ketchup does so well. The good news (!), is I'm back on the sauce, but I'm not one of those people who puts ketchup on everything or carries a mini bottle in my bag. Similarly, my dad wasn't a ketchup freak either. When the original Ketchup World was alive and swinging, we would have tasting parties and my parents would invite their friends to try out all the ketchups and force them to write testimonials. That was fun. Not related to ketchup, but fun fact is my dad has a horrible perception of volume and mass and he once bought 1 pound of ground meat to make hamburgers for 15 people. My mom loved that.

Unfortunately, there are some things in this world you cannot change...and one of those things is the American palette and their associated understanding of what ketchup should taste like. The gross majority of people can't shake the taste of Heinz, nor do they want to. We want vinegar, we want salt, and apparently high fructose corn syrup, too. While there was definitely a population that was looking to expand their condiment-based horizons, much like Larry, the speed with which someone could consume a new bottle of ketchup and feel the need to try another new variety was frankly too slow to sustain an entire business. Believe it or not, there is a critical mass when it comes to gourmet ketchup. This is the Malcom Gladwell article that put the final nail in the coffin on Ketchup World for Larry.

Overall, Larry broke even and sold the company within 48 hours. There were no tears, just about 20 cases of banana ketchup left to linger in our basement and many fond memories. Ketchup World continued to exist and its purity was bastardized by its predecessor with hot sauces and some mustards. It was sold once more to a man in New Jersey who still owns the original domain. It is now defunct and the owner is holding the domain name hostage from me.

Seeing my dad build Ketchup World in his free time was my closest exposure to entrepreneurship in a period of massive change in the way we consume. He always met this project with humor and authenticity, a rarity now in the mimetic scores of brand marketing and storefronts today. I’ve always wanted to have a store or some retail concept. I’ve worked in fashion and retail for over a decade now and I’ve witnessed similar shockwaves to consumerism that inspired my dad to take a stab at something new. Revisiting his work, it’s challenged me to ask “What does it mean to open up shop now and why?” With that in mind, I felt implored to bring back Ketchup World as a foundational block in my own understanding of retail, but most importantly a record for what my dad built and what the world wasn’t ready for in 1999.