H.J. Heinz started bottling horseradish in 1869 in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania — not ketchup, which came seven years later in 1876. The horseradish was packaged in clear glass rather than the colored bottles that competitors used to hide low-quality product. That decision, to show rather than conceal, became the founding principle of the Heinz brand: the purity promise, the 57 varieties campaign launched in 1896, the distinctive bottle shape that American consumers would recognize for the next century and a half. James L. Kraft began his cheese business in Chicago in 1903, initially buying cheese wholesale and delivering it by horse-drawn wagon to merchants. In 1915, he patented a pasteurized cheese process that could extend shelf life from days to months, solving the distribution problem that had made fresh cheese impractical for national retail. Kraft Dinner, the iconic mac and cheese product, launched in 1937 and became a wartime staple when rationing made protein scarce. Both companies spent the twentieth century acquiring, extending, and diversifying. Kraft merged with General Foods in 1989, creating one of the largest food companies in the world. Philip Morris acquired Kraft in 1988. Heinz was taken private by 3G Capital and Berkshire Hathaway in 2013 for $28 billion. Two years later, the same investors merged Heinz with Kraft in a $55 billion transaction, creating The Kraft Heinz Company as a new publicly traded entity with a mandate to extract value through disciplined cost management. The post-merger period produced significant goodwill writedowns and eventually a 2019 SEC investigation into accounting irregularities, both of which forced a strategic reassessment and multiple rounds of executive turnover. The company has been searching for a new growth thesis ever since.