What is it? Slice of Sauce, a solid sandwich condiment
Innovator: Entrepreneur Emily Williams
What was she thinking? Ketchup. Sure, it’s sweet. Sure, it’s tasty. But the mess! Hit that Heinz bottle in the wrong spot and you can destroy your blouse. Or maybe just get a spot on your blouse. Which will probably come out in the wash. OK, so this may not be much of a problem. But Emily Williams, chef and entrepreneur, has a solution. It’s a fruit-leather-like slice of ketchup — built on mixed, ground, and dried vegetables — that you can put on your burger or grilled cheese. If she wants to bring her Slice of Sauce to market, though, she’s got to raise $15,000 through a Kickstarter campaign.
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Did it work? The Kickstarter is performing quite well. She’d raised nearly $14,000 as of late last week. But she’s facing some pushback online. A hard-hitting investigation by a reporter with Vice Media’s “Munchies” team shows Los Angeles chef Ernesto Uchimura created something similar — Ketchup Leather, he called it — as far back as 2014. “Opportunists are everywhere,” he huffed. Williams says she was only “vaguely aware” of Uchimura’s product when she developed her own. Still, the lesson, here, was clear: Even the most outlandish ideas have already been had.