H.J. Heinz Company

H.J. Heinz Company, H.J. Heinz Co. (HNZ) is significantly strengthening its focus on the T.G.I. Friday’s line of frozen snacks and appetizers by increasing its investment in marketing and product development in fiscal year 2013. The brand’s newest snack and appetizer item, T.G.I. Friday’s Mac & Cheese Wedges, capitalizes on the comfort food trend by taking one of America’s favorite comfort foods and turning it into an easy to prepare and fun to eat snack.

Heinz and T.G.I. Friday’s have a successful licensing partnership that has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past 11 years. The T.G.I. Friday’s frozen portfolio is a $250 million business for Heinz and the fourth largest brand in the Heinz U.S. Consumer Products portfolio.

“The T.G.I. Friday’s brand is an important growth driver for our North American business,” said Scott O’Hara, President and CEO, Heinz North America. “The frozen snacks and appetizer line is the segment of the T.G.I. Friday’s business with the highest growth and profit potential and most favorable consumer dynamics, which is why we have chosen to focus our efforts on this category.”

The latest snacks and appetizer innovation capitalizes on one of America’s favorite comfort foods. T.G.I. Friday’s frozen Mac & Cheese Wedges combine macaroni pasta with a creamy cheddar, Parmesan and Romano cheese sauce and are coated in a crispy breading. This innovative new product that embodies the fun and flavor of the T.G.I. Friday’s brand begins shipping this month and will be available at major retailers in a 15.5 oz box for a suggested retail price of $5.99.

“The ability to leverage such a well-known and loved restaurant brand in retail has added tremendous value to our frozen portfolio of products,” said David Ciesinski, Group Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Heinz U.S. Consumer Products. “The T.G.I. Friday’s frozen snacks and appetizers product line continues to be a robust and growing business for Heinz and remains a cornerstone of our frozen portfolio.”

“Heinz and T.G.I. Friday’s are long-time partners, and our licensing relationship will continue to flourish as we work to reflect in our retail products the significant culinary innovation and development taking place in our restaurants,” said Ricky Richardson, Chief Operating Officer, Carlson Restaurants. “Heinz continues to work with us to develop delicious and flavorful snack products that enable our guests to bring home that Friday feeling any day of the week.”

Henry John Heinz III

Henry John Heinz III, Henry John Heinz (October 11, 1844 – May 14, 1919) was an American businessman who founded the H. J. Heinz Company. Heinz was one of eight children born to John Henry Heinz and Anna Margaretha Heinz. Both parents had emigrated from Kallstadt, Germany and settled in the Birmingham section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-today known as the South Side.

When Henry was six, the family moved several miles up the Allegheny River to the little town of Sharpsburg. There, at age six, young Henry (called Harry by his family) started helping his mother tend a small backyard garden behind the family home. At age eight Henry was canvassing the neighborhood with a basket under each arm selling vegetables from the family garden door to door. By age nine he was growing, grinding, bottling and selling his own brand of horseradish sauce, based on his mother’s recipe. At ten he was given a ¾-acre (3,000 m²) garden of his own and had graduated to a wheelbarrow to deliver his vegetables. At twelve he was working 3½ acres (14,000 m²) of garden using a horse and cart for his three-times-a-week deliveries to grocery stores in Pittsburgh. At seventeen he was grossing $2,400 a year-a handsome sum for the times.

Heinz attended public schools and then Duff’s Business College. After graduating from college, he started employment with his father’s brick manufacturing business, eventually becoming a partner in the firm. During this time he continued growing and selling fresh produce.

John Kerry’s Wife

John Kerry’s Wife, Teresa Heinz says she is being treated for breast cancer discovered through a mammogram and wants younger women to keep undergoing the tests despite a federal panel’s recent recommendation to reduce their frequency.
The 71-year-old wife of the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, of Massachusetts, told the Associated Press that the cost of mammography is far lower than the physical and personal tolls women ages 40 to 60 face if their cancer goes undetected early and they later have to be treated with aggressive chemotherapy.

“Chemotherapy is serious. It also costs a lot of money. It’s very painful. And it’s very destructive of people’s — most people’s — lives for a while, anyway. So why put people through that instead of just having a test that’s done, and it’s done?” Heinz told the AP during an interview this week. “So that’s why I was so upset about that decision of this panel.”

She recalled nurses in a hospital where she was receiving a magnetic resonance imaging procedure, or MRI, being “so livid” when they heard the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommend last month that women start receiving mammograms at age 50, rather than the long-standing practice of 40.

“They said, ‘We’ve taken all these years to teach women to do preventive mammograms, and now look at this,'” Heinz said.

President Obama’s administration later backed off the recommendation amid criticism from many medical and women’s groups. It said the government’s policies “remain unchanged.”

Kerry helped launch Obama on the national political stage by giving the then-Illinois senator the keynote speaking role at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Heinz — the widow of Sen. John Heinz, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune — said she found out in late September that she had cancer in her left breast after having her annual mammogram.