Buyer's guide to brown sauces & ketchups

This is a free buyer's guide from Ethical Consumer, the UK's leading alternative consumer organisation. We research the social and environmental records of companies.

More detailed versions of this guide are available. See the links at the bottom of the page.

Best Buys as of Jan/Feb 2007

As our ratings are constantly updated, it is possible that company ratings on the ethiscore website may have changed since this report was written.

Meridian comes out best followed by Granovita and Whole Earth. All three brands produce organic varieties.

Brand	Rating
Granovita brown sauce [A, O]	13.5
Whole Earth ketchup [O]	13.5
Meridian ketchup [O]	12.5
Branston sauce	6.5
Heinz Organic Tomato Ketchup [O]	5.5
Daddies brown sauce	4.5
Heinz Tomato Ketchup	4.5
HP sauce	4.5

The higher the rating the more ethical the brand. This whole scorecard was last updated from our database on 14 October 2009 but some individual company ratings may have changed since then. Up to the minute information can be seen by subscribers using Ethiscore.
Learn more about our ratings.

Red & brown sauce

The most well-known brands of sauce - Heinz Tomato Ketchup, HP and Daddies - are all owned by HJ Heinz. The company is currently embroiled in criticism from the Transport and General Workers Union for shifting production of HP Sauce from the UK to the Netherlands with the loss of 120 jobs.(1) There are companies offering organic, more natural sauces, like Granovita and Whole Earth, but these are also owned by fairly large companies these days. Meridian Foods management bought the company out of larger Greencore in 2005. None of the companies covered received ECRA’s best marks for environmental reporting or supply chain codes covering workers’ rights. Glass bottles are much more likely to find their way into the recycling.

References: 1 www.tgwu.org.uk 9/5/06

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