2026: The ketchupification of culture
Ketchup doesn’t replace food. It coats it. The steak is still there, you just can’t taste it anymore. Movies, music, cities, faces, hotels, apps: not worse, not fake, just coated. Smooth enough to slide across every algorithm, every border, every tired brain. Impossible to dislike, impossible to remember.
The real persists. We’re just too exhausted to chew it.2025 filled the bottles. 2026 is the year of ketchup.
Walk into any supermarket. Spaghetti sauce comes in thirty-six varieties (at least). Chunky, smooth, garlic, mushroom, roasted pepper.
Mustard is the same: yellow, Dijon, whole grain, spicy brown, honey. Pickles, olive oil, vinegar, all segmented, all specific.
But Ketchup is one thing.
Heinz still holds “more than two-thirds” of the U.S. ketchup category, and over 80% of Europe. The competitors taste like Heinz.
I’m biased. I’m French. I never saw a bottle of ketchup at my parents’ house. Most restaurants in France don’t carry it. I’ve lived in the US for fifteen years. I have never bought a bottle.
I’m not alone. Barack Obama famously told Anthony Bourdain that putting ketchup on a hot dog is not acceptable past the age of eight. Bourdain mentioned his daughter had just put ketchup on eggs. Obama’s response: “An intervention.”, “you know what, that’s not acceptable. I’m sorry”.
In 2011, France regulated ketchup in school cafeterias. Sauces couldn’t sit in self-serve dispensers anymore. Ketchup could only be served with fries, once a week. The press called it a ban. It wasn’t. But the reasoning was real. Jacques Hazan, president of the national parents’ council: “Children mask the taste of food by adding ketchup.”
***
Twenty-one years ago, I bookmarked that Malcolm Gladwell article. “The Ketchup Conundrum,” The New Yorker, September 2004. I re-read it last month by coincidence, digging into Evernote that I never use.
Gladwell’s describes Howard Moskowitz. In the 1970s and 80s, Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry with a simple insight: there is no perfect product. Only perfect products, plural. He called it “the plural nature of perfection.”
“One day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.” — Malcolm Gladwell
Prego hired him. At the time, Ragu dominated spaghetti sauce. Moskowitz made forty-five varieties, tested them across the country, and found something the industry had missed: a third of Americans wanted their sauce chunky. Ragu didn’t make chunky. Prego launched Extra Chunky and broke the monopoly. Today there are thirty-six varieties of Ragu alone.
Moskowitz did the same for pickles, mustard, coffee. Wherever he looked, he found segments. Plurality won.
But ketchup refused.
Jim Wigon tried. He made World’s Best Ketchup, six flavors, real tomatoes, maple syrup instead of corn syrup, three times the price of Heinz. Gladwell follows him through the article, rooting for the underdog.
Wigon lost.
Gladwell’s explanation is seductive. Heinz, he argues, is sensorially perfect. It hits all five fundamental tastes - sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami - in roughly equal concentrations, perfectly blended. Food scientists have a word for this: amplitude.
Here’s how Gladwell describes it in the article:
“When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.”
You can’t isolate the elements. You can’t taste the tomato. You can’t taste the vinegar. You can’t taste the sweet or the sour or the bitter. They converge. They become one thing. One gestalt. One non-flavor that registers as “good” without registering as anything specific.
Business schools teach Heinz as the solution, the product so perfect it couldn’t be improved. But what if Heinz isn’t the solution? What if Heinz is the problem?
The problem isn’t that ketchup tastes bad.
The problem is that ketchup makes everything taste like ketchup.
***
Ketchupification is the smooth, impossible-to-dislike coating that erases specificity.
Not “high-gloss.” Ketchup isn’t luxurious, it’s cheap, red, everywhere. The coating doesn’t look expensive. It just makes everything taste the same.
A single gestalt to quote Gladwell. The gestalt is utopian: harmony without conflict, synthesis without loss, the end of friction. A place that doesn’t exist. Can’t exist.
The real persists underneath. The steak is still there. You just can’t taste it anymore.
This is not the same as flattening. Flattening kills variety, many things become one thing. That’s the Frankfurt School critique, the globalization homogenization argument.
Ketchupification is different. The variety remains. World’s Best Ketchup is on the shelf. The artisanal option exists. But it all tastes like Heinz, or it fails. The options persist formally; they’re rendered experientially irrelevant.
Ketchupification is neutralization.
This is also not the same as adding spice. Mustard highlights, it makes the sausage more sausage. Hot sauce reveals, it cuts through fat. Salt brings out what’s already there. These condiments serve the food.
Ketchup erases. The steak, the eggs, the fries, they become delivery mechanisms for the coating. The food isn’t enhanced. It’s subdued.
Subdued. That’s the verb. To conquer. To quiet. To tame.
Tiffany’s buys Basquiat, subdued. A punk song becomes hold music, subdued. A dangerous idea becomes a corporate value, subdued. The wild, the rough, the specific, all smoothed into one gestalt.
LinkedIn AI-suggested comments. Ketchup’d. The “Rewrite with AI” button. Ketchup’d, Corporate Memphis art style. Ketchup’d. Spotify “Chill Hits” playlists. K’d. Sweetgreen. K’d. ChatGPT’s polite neutrality.K’d. Airbnb “greige” interiors. K’d. Vape flavors named “Miami Mint.” K’d. HR therapy-speak (“let’s unpack that,” “I’m holding space”). K’d. The word “elevated” applied to anything. K’d. “Craft” cocktails at Applebee’s. K’d. Truffle oil on fries.K’d. Celebrity tequila. K’d. The entire vocabulary of corporate synergy. K’d. Apple TV+ shows. K’d. And whatever Gwyneth is selling this week. K’d.
Milan Kundera defined kitsch as “the denial of shit.” The refusal to acknowledge that the world contains anything ugly, difficult, or repellent.
Ketchupification is the sensory denial of shit. The refusal to taste the bitter, the sour, the strange. The coating that makes everything go down easy.
We don’t want to chew. We want to swallow.
***
Every decade gets the diagnosis it deserves.
The 60s asked if we were living or just watching (Debord’s Spectacle).
The 80s asked if the map had replaced the territory (Baudrillard’s Simulation).
The 90s asked why everything looked the same everywhere (Ritzer’s Rationalization). The 2020s asked why platforms inevitably turn against their users (Doctorow’s Enshittification).
2026 asks: why have we stopped wanting to taste?
Here’s the difference. Previous theories diagnosed what was done to us. Spectacle, simulation, standardization, extraction, enshittification, operations performed on reality or on people.
Ketchupification is a demand. The coating isn’t imposed. It’s ordered. The straw, the IV drip, the ice cubes in rosé. Bypass mechanisms.
“Impossible to dislike” is the goal. Not good. Not distinctive. An average. A safe gestalt. Something that won’t spike, won’t challenge, won’t require you to chew.
Why? Because the Real keeps surfacing. Climate collapse, wars, inequalities, algorithmic precarity, political violence, etc.
The world is unbearable. We construct our reality precisely to keep the « réel », the unbearable at bay (Lacan).
Ketchup is that fantasy in edible form. A coating that lets us keep reality at bay.
Not simulation replacing reality. Defense against a reality we can’t face.
***
Ketchupification doesn’t create from nothing. It coats something that existed.
Design: Memphis was radical. Ettore Sottsass and the Milan collective made furniture that refused functionalism, garish, angular, provocative. It had edges. Corporate Memphis (Alegria) took the palette and the playfulness, removed the provocation, and produced friendly blob people. Same colors. No danger. Xoana Herrera, an illustrator at the design agency Buck, who helped develop the style, explains the figures are “ethnically non-specific to represent diversity.” (!!!)
Diversity through the erasure of specificity. If nobody is represented, everyone is represented. The safe gestalt. The coating.
Music: K-Pop has specific texture. The Korean training system, the language, the choreography, the industry structure. You can single it out. KATSEYE is the ketchup layer, American-produced, English-language, optimized to hit every market without the friction of specificity. From everywhere. From nowhere.
Television: Prestige TV had edges. The Sopranos made you sit with discomfort. The Wire demanded you chew. Recently I watched shows like The Morning Show and The Beast in Me. Great actors. Jennifer Aniston (-ish…), Reese Witherspoon, Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys. Great production value. Beautiful sets. Good plots. Clever dialogue. They’re trying to hit all five receptors at once. Premium and commercial. Gourmet cheeseburger. The second I turn off the TV, they’re gone. I couldn’t tell you a single scene. It’s ketchup.
I prefer chunks. I want some receptors satisfied distinctly, others left alone.
I’d rather watch Roma one night and Love is Blind the next than a show that tries to blend the two. Roma is bitter and sour. It sits with you. Love is Blind is pure sugar. It doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Food: The “gourmet cheeseburger” (Bela Bajaria’s term for Netflix’s goal). Premium signifiers, brioche bun, high-end ingredients, mass palatability. It looks artisanal. It tastes like ketchup.
In each case: something specific came first. The coating came after.
***
Ketchupification has a language. You’ve heard it.
Elevated. Curated. Intentional. Immersive. Bespoke. Artisanal. Crafted. Thoughtful.
These words don’t describe. They coat. An “elevated dining experience” tells you nothing about the food. A “curated selection” tells you nothing about what’s selected. “Intentional design” (versus what? unintentional?) means someone made choices, which is what design already means.
These are non-words for non-objects. They add a layer of status without adding information. The linguistic equivalent of the sauce: flavorless signifiers of quality that prevent you from asking what’s actually underneath.
The words function precisely because they’re empty. They can attach to anything. A hotel room. A playlist. A sandwich. A candle. The coating works because it doesn’t interfere with what’s underneath.
Real description has edges. “Salty.” “Cramped.” “Loud.” “Slow.” These words tell you something.
Ketchup vocabulary has no edges. It’s impossible to dislike. It goes with everything. And it makes everything taste the same.
***
Why now? Why do we want the coating?
We are building a Ketchup Society that hits every emotional and intellectual receptor so perfectly that we never have to feel the spike of a specific experience.
The easy answer is algorithms. Optimization. A/B testing that selects for impossible-to-dislike. That’s true but insufficient. Algorithms serve demand. The question is why we demand ketchup.
The deeper answer is finitude.
Arnaud Orain describes our era as “finitude capitalism.” The liberal promise was growth, expand the pie, everyone benefits, tomorrow will be bigger than today. That promise is broken. Climate, resources, attention, time: the limits are visible now. We’re not just risk-averse. We’re insolvent.
Chewing costs energy. Processing complexity, sitting with discomfort, distinguishing flavors, these require cognitive surplus we no longer have. We’re working longer hours for less security, doom-scrolling through wars and mass shootings and climate collapse, managing precarity as a lifestyle. Who has the energy to chew?
So we reach for the IV drip. The straw. The ice cubes. The coating that delivers the nutrient, plot, vibe, stimulus, without the digestion. Ketchup is the most energy-efficient transfer of culture. Maximum palatability, minimum friction. You get the calories. You don’t have to taste.
This isn’t laziness. It’s triage. When everything is on fire, you don’t savor a meal. You swallow what you can and keep moving.
2026 Ketchup culture is an IV drip for a burnout society.
***
This is where ketchupification connects to something larger.
I’ve written recently about my cultural horseshoe theory: the old vertical hierarchy of High Art versus Mass Culture is dead. It bent into a horseshoe where the extremes meet. Luxury and Pop now converge at the tips, producing the same frictionless, placeless product. A $29,000 Tiffany Pikachu and a Netflix algorithm follow the same logic. Real culture hides in the curve, where friction still exists.
But I never explained the mechanism. How do things move from curve to tips? What’s the operation that transforms something specific into something extractable?
Ketchup.
The curve is where value gets created. Friction, locality, specificity. The neighborhood scene. The lo-fi recording. The thing that requires context. You had to be there. You have to chew.
The tips are where value gets extracted. Frictionless, placeless, optimized for flow. The algorithm-friendly product. The airport lounge. The thing that works everywhere because it tastes like nothing specific.
Memphis had edges. Corporate Memphis doesn’t. K-Pop has texture, language, training system, specific industry, place. KATSEYE doesn’t. The grandmother’s recipe has a story, a place, a reason it tastes like that. The fast-casual version doesn’t.
The operation is always the same. Remove what makes it specific. Keep what makes it palatable. The result can travel. It can scale. It can be liked by everyone and loved by no one. Impossible to dislike.
The curve is where culture gets made. The tips are where it gets monetized. Ketchupification is what happens in between.
***
The mustard aisle still exists. 1,690 varieties. Nobody removed it. The choice is still there.
Ketchupification isn’t a conspiracy. There is no villain applying the coating. It’s a transaction. We asked for this. We’re tired, we’re overwhelmed, we’re triaging our way through a world that’s on fire. The IV drip makes sense. Swallowing is easier than chewing.
But the curve is still there too. The local scene. The rough recording. The restaurant with no English menu. And no Ketchup. The thing that requires context, that you had to be there, that won’t travel well. The places where inefficiency is protection.
Go back to the curve. Refuse the pour. Chew.
This is brilliant and terrifyingly true. I'll continue to digest this piece. Appreciate your perspective.
I’ve never read the word “ketchup” more and enjoyed it the whole time. Really compelling read!