page_title: HP Sauce
section_title: Heinz takeover
hierarchical_section_title: HP Sauce / Heinz takeover
caption_attribution_description: English: The HP Sauce factory Photograph take from Thomas Street looking across the Aston Expressway to the HP Sauce factory.
context_page_description: HP Sauce is a brown sauce originally produced by HP Foods in the United Kingdom, now produced by the H. J. Heinz Company in the Netherlands. It was named after London's Houses of Parliament. Since its first appearance on British dinner tables in the late 19th century, HP Sauce has become an icon of British culture. It was the best-selling brand of brown sauce in the UK in 2005, with 73.8% of the retail market.
  HP Sauce has a tomato base, blended with malt vinegar and spirit vinegar, sugars, dates, cornflour, rye flour, salt, spices and tamarind. It is used as a condiment with hot and cold savoury food, and as an ingredient in soups and stews.
  The picture on the front of the bottle is a selection of London landmarks including Elizabeth Tower, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Bridge.
context_section_description: The brand was passed from the Midlands Vinegar Company to Smedley HP Foods Limited, acquired by a division of Imperial Tobacco, then sold to the French Groupe Danone SA in 1988 for £199 million.
  In June 2005, Heinz purchased the parent company, HP Foods, from Danone. In October of that year the United Kingdom Office of Fair Trading referred the takeover to the Competition Commission, which approved the £440 million acquisition in April 2006.
  In May 2006, Heinz announced plans to switch production of HP Sauce from Aston to its European sauces facility in Elst, Netherlands, only weeks after HP launched a campaign to "Save the Proper British Cafe". The announcement prompted a call to boycott Heinz products. The move, resulting in the loss of approximately 125 jobs at the Aston factory, was criticised by politicians and union officials, especially as the parent company still wanted to use the image of the House of Commons on its bottles. In the same month, local Labour MP Khalid Mahmood brandished a bottle of HP Sauce during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons as part of a protest against the Heinz move. He also made reference to the sauce's popularity with the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. These plans were confirmed on 23 August 2006 and the factory at Aston ceased production on 16 March 2007. A week later a "wake" was held at the location of the factory.
  The factory was demolished in the summer of 2007.
  The six-acre Aston site was purchased by developer Chancerygate in 2007 at £800,000 per acre; they subsequently sold it for half that price and it now houses a distribution warehouse for East End Foods.
caption: The HP Sauce factory in 2006
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