With Restaurants Facing a Ketchup Crisis, Here's How to Make Your Own

Restaurants are playing ketchup catch-up, as a red sauce shortage hinders their return to service after a year of Covid restrictions. It has given rise to a secondary market, where collected ketchup sachets are being traded for a premium, and restaurants scramble to source their sauce.

With the pandemic requiring eateries to use single-serving ketchup packets instead of bottles, for health and safety reasons, demand for the condiment has skyrocketed and created a shortage. It has seen many entrepreneurial diners, who have hoarded their ketchup packets, turn to eBay and Facebook’s Marketplace to make easy money.

Single-serving packets of Heinz ketchup, one of the most desired brands, can go for as much as $4 each, or a bargain bulk price of $50 for 20, and an underground market is growing for those who have collected their ketchup packets over time.

While you may not find ketchup in a high-end, Michelin-star restaurant, the tomato-based condiment remains as popular today as it has always been. There is a whole category of restaurant that depends on the red sauce as a fundamental dressing for fries and burgers, and they wouldn't be able to give their customers what they want without it.

For the serial hoarders out there who have endured years of taunts and snide remarks for their compulsion to pocket the packets of ketchup from their local diner, perhaps this is the ultimate vindication, that you really do never know when something’s value might rise because of an event like a global pandemic.