> he only way to compete with that is to make a ketchup that is less appealing to the average person but more appealing to some niche subset of people

You sound like it's some kind of bizzarre weird strategy that only few insane weirdos would try. As in fact that's how most of the food brands (by number, not by volume) would work - find your niche and serve it. And not only food, of course. Some produce average food for "average person", some produce excellent food for people that value it. That's how it has always been.

I don't agree. The reason that average people eat average quality food is because they get paid average wages, not because they don't value the good stuff.

For instance, pretty much anybody will prefer high quality ice cream to basic ice cream, but the reason that basic ice cream still exists is because the fancy stuff costs 5x more.

The problem with making a "fancy" ketchup is that ketchup is a completely artificial food. The quality of a ketchup is in how balanced it is. And balancing a ketchup is a fixed cost not a marginal cost. Whoever makes the most revenue will have the best ketchup.

I have very hard time believing it. Food that I consider above average may be a little more expensive, but mainly because it's much less mass-produced. And there's better quality ice cream that costs roughly about the same (though much harder to find), and terrible quality ice cream that costs more. We don't have to go far - Coca Cola earns billions selling basically caffeinated sugar water. Not because people don't have any money to buy better drinks. Because people want to buy specifically sugar water, because they have learned that's what cool people drink.

Finding a working ketchup formula may be not easy. But you have to do it once. Then that's it, you can sell it forever. And it doesn't take that much. As well as it doesn't take it that much to not just stuff tomato paste with as much sugar as chemistry would allow and call it "ketchup". And yet, mass brands to that and a lot of people happily buy it.

Better stuff may cost more, because of smaller volumes and better quality controls, but not 5x. At least not all of them. I just checked the list of ketchups in Whole Foods. Heintz is 17c per ounce. 365 brand is 8.7c/oz. Others range from 18c to 73c, pretty much equally distributed. Yes, there's one 5x brand - but that's one, out of a dozen. And that's just one store, I'm sure there are more brands which will occupy the whole gamut from 1x to 10x (I am sure somebody somewhere sells a ketchup for more than a dollar per oz, even if I haven't seen one).

> The reason that average people eat average quality food is because they get paid average wages, not because they don't value the good stuff.

Tastes really aren't universal and, more than that, have a certain average (though there is large individual variation) contribution from familiarity and other path-dependent effects.

Do average people eat average food because of average income, or average tastes, of average tastes due to average income? Each is part of the story (and how much of a part each is varies from person to person and category of food.)

> The fancy Dijon ketchup never tastes better though.

To your taste, sure. For lots of people, the same thing is true of dijon (and other not-French’s-yellow) mustard.

OTOH, plenty of people disagree with you on that, which is why there are established, succesful—if individually mostly niche—alternatives.

> Heinz has had decades and armies of food scientists and tasters to dial in their recipe.

So did French’s. The hard part of getting broad reach on alternatives isn’t making some alternative that enough people will like if they try, but getting enough people over the activation energy threshold to try. Grey Poupon’s breakout marketing campaign in the 80s did that for mustard; there hasn't been an equivalent for ketchup.

And, sure, that probably doesn’t unseat the dominant player, but that’s not what thr uothread discussion of “dijon” alternatives was about.