Heinz ketchup spruces up label with a tomato

— -- Trying to "ketchup" with consumer demand for healthier foods, H.J. Heinz dropped the gherkin pickle from the condiment's more-than-a-century-old label logo and spruced it up with a tomato on the vine with the slogan "Grown not made."

Gherkin groupies — or maybe just people who don't like needless change in favorite brands — are fighting back with Facebook.com page "Save the Heinz Pickle!" Among comments there: "The pickle is quintessentially 'Heinz' and is emblematic of your history. If your ketchup containers have a tomato on them, they will look like any other common ketchup, such as Hunt's."

In a pickle about its pickle, Heinz ketchup director Noel Geoffroy says the company is "flattered that some people feel a sense of nostalgia about the pickle" — but the tomato stays. But take heart, pickle fans. Geoffroy says the pickle will stay in the Heinz logo on its vinegar, chili sauce and mustard.

Lasagna, hold the anchovies

Just in time for the Super Bowl, Pizza Hut is blurring the line further on what you can have a pizza joint deliver to your door. With pizza sales on the skids nationally, the Hut Monday will deliver lasagna.

The move comes nine months after it began to deliver rotini pasta dishes and five months after rival Domino's Pizza added sub sandwiches.

Pasta soon will become a $1 billion business at Pizza Hut, spokesman Chris Fuller says. The new Tuscani lasagna — an order weighs in at slightly more than 3 pounds — fetches $14.99 and includes five baked breadsticks. Pasta is becoming so central to Pizza Hut that the chain seemed to be slowly pushing aside the "Pizza" of its name. Some new ads simply refer to the chain as "The Hut."

But Fuller tells the Ad Team, "We'll always be Pizza Hut. We think of the Hut as to Pizza Hut as Coke is to Coca-Cola."

Chew on this, Joe

Marketers from Honest Tea to Dunkin' Donuts waved the red, white and blue with patriotic promotions around President Obama's inauguration last week, but Cadbury's Trident gum went straight for the white — as in Vice President Biden's shockingly white smile. On Inauguration Day, it launched JoeBidensTeeth.com and offered a free pack of gum to the first 50,000 people who uploaded a photo of their own smile. By the end of last week, it had already gotten more than 10,000 on the site, which proclaims that "the brightness of your teeth reflects the level of your patriotism."