The pricier ketchup has fewer tomatoes. We read both labels

Two bottles of mild ketchup, both 450 grams, both from the same shelf. One costs 6.45 zł, the other 9.49 zł. We checked what the difference actually buys.

Prices converted to kilos by the shop itself:

• Kotlin mild ketchup 450 g: 6.45 zł, that's 14.33 zł per kilo
• Heinz mild ketchup 450 g: 9.49 zł, that's 21.09 zł per kilo

That's 47 percent more per kilo and 3.04 zł more at the till. The obvious question is whether the pricier bottle holds more tomato.

It doesn't. Both labels declare how many grams of tomatoes went into 100 g of product. Kotlin says 160 grams, Heinz says 148. The cheaper ketchup actually has slightly more.

The difference sits elsewhere, in the length of the list. Kotlin: tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, modified starch, salt, citric acid, natural flavourings, spices. Heinz: tomatoes, spirit vinegar, sugar, salt, spice and herb extracts, spices. The pricier bottle has no modified starch and no flavourings.

That's the honest answer to what those three złoty buy. Not tomatoes, a simpler recipe. Whether that's worth 47 percent is yours to decide, since in ketchup the starch mostly does the thickening.

There's a third bottle few people weigh up at that shelf. Kotlin has 18 grams of sugars per 100 grams, roughly eighteen percent of the contents. Pudliszki no-added-sugar, 440 g for 7.79 zł, works out at 17.70 zł per kilo, with 86 percent tomato purée and 4 grams of sugars. It's sweetened with sucralose, so it's a trade-off too, not a flawless product. But if you want to change something real about your ketchup, sugar is a bigger lever than the logo.

The rule for your next shop is simple. A ketchup label carries two numbers that say more than the name: grams of tomatoes used per 100 g of product, and sugars in the nutrition table. Both sit in small print on the back, and both take ten seconds to compare.

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Data: prices, price-per-kilo, ingredient lists and nutrition values read live from product pages on zakupy.biedronka.pl on 11 August 2026. Our own calculations.