Heinz, fed up with restaurants and cafés substituting their bottles with off-brand ketchup, devised a method to stop it.

Most people associate tomato ketchup with Heinz.

Other brands are available; however, most eateries use a Heinz ketchup bottle.

Learning that restaurants refill a Heinz bottle with a lesser brand of ketchup once the initial dose of tomato deliciousness has diminished is hardly shocking.

There is a way to identify if ketchup is genuine Heinz, as many people have discovered thanks to a viral social media post.

“This is a useless but marginally fascinating fact,” explained Facebook user Man Behaving Dadly. Heinz is so fed up with restaurants and cafés refilling their bottles with non-Heinz ketchup to ‘trick consumers’ that they created a label sticker whose outside border matches the precise hue of real Heinz ketchup. If it matches (left), it’s the actual thing. If it doesn’t (right), it’s a condiment scam.”

Many people have flooded the Facebook comments area with their reactions to the popular post.

“Don’t need a sticker; we know when we taste it,” one individual joked.

A second wrote: “If you can’t tell the difference between Heinz and other brands, there’s something seriously wrong with you,” while a third commented: “I’ve dined in cafes and watched the waiters ‘fill up’ Heinz bottles with value items. It’s a dangerous game to play if one contains allergens but not the other.

And a fourth replied, “It’s very unfortunate that they have to do this!” This should not happen because of allergies. “It could be very dangerous.”

Heinz has previously addressed “ketchup fraud” in a campaign.

Megan Lang, Global Head of Brand Communications and Creativity at Heinz, commented on the campaign: “We saw someone refilling Heinz with generic ketchup, which prompted us to dig deeper, and through social listening, we discovered that this was a true and widespread behavior.”

“We thought, what better way to express our core brand belief that ‘It Has to Be Heinz’ than to simply amplify an existing consumer behavior in a supportive and funny way?”

The tagline ‘ketchup fraud’ appeared on billboards and advertisements throughout Chicago and New York.