Henry John Heinz was an American businessman. He was founder of the H. J. Heinz Company, manufacturing prepared food.
Background
Henry John Heinz was born on October 11, 1844, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of German parents, the eldest of the eight children of Henry and Margaretha (Schmidt) Heinz, and spent his boyhood and youth in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania.
Education
Henry Heinz completed the course in Duff’s Business College.
Career
Henry Heinz became the bookkeeper and factotum of his father’s brickyard and was taken into partnership when he came of age. He put the business on a year-round basis by installing heating flues and drying apparatus in the plant, and to the end of his life he was a connoisseur of bricks and brick-laying. He always attended personally to the buying and laying of brick for the buildings of his company, and his office desk, which he seldom used for anything else, was frequently piled with samples collected on his travels.
The paternal brickyard was only an interlude, however, in his real career, which began, when he was eight years old, by his peddling the surplus produce from the family garden.
Using hotbeds and intensive cultivation, he obtained two or three crops a year and steadily enlarged his acreage and market until in 1860 he employed several women and made three wagon deliveries a week to Pittsburgh grocers. In 1869 he and Edward John Noble formed a partnership to make and sell grated horseradish and later admitted Edward John Noble to the firm and moved their business to Pittsburgh. They went bankrupt in 1875, Heinz later paying his share of their debts in full.
The next year, with his brother John and his cousin Frederick as partners and himself as manager, Heinz started the partnership of F. & J. Heinz to manufacture pickles, condiments, and other prepared food. In 1888 this partnership was reorganized as the H. J. Heinz Company, and in 1905 it was incorporated with Heinz as president. In 1909 they had 6, 523 employees, twenty-five branch factories, eighty-five pickle-salting stations, its own bottle, box, and can-factories, and its own see farms, and was putting the annual harvests from 100, 000 acres into bottles, cans, and barrels.
In 1896 Heinz invented the advertising slogan “fifty-seven varieties”, which became an Amen, proverbial expression; he knew at the time that his factories were making many kinds of goods, but “fifty-seven” sounded to him like a magic number and proved to be one.
Achievements
Religion
Through accident rather than through any changes of doctrinal opinion, Heinz became a member successively of the Lutheran, the Methodist Episcopal, the Methodist Protestant, and the Presbyterian churches. He was a Sunday-school superintendent for twenty- five years and prominent in state, national, and international Sunday-school associations.
Interests
Henry Heinz became in his later years an enthusiastic traveler, and collected watches and ivories that are now in the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.
Connections
Heinz was married on September 23, 1869, to Sarah Sloan Young, of Irish descent, by whom he had five children.