“You don’t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?” declares the group’s website, alluding to the multinational’s links to the wife of Mr Bush’s Democratic challenger.

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Teresa Heinz Kerry was, until 2002, a registered Republican. However, Americans who buy Heinz tomato ketchup are supporting the Kerrys and other “liberal causes”, the website proclaims.

W Ketchup has sold a mere 50,000 bottles to date, and not begun to dent Heinz’s annual sales of 660 million bottles. However, Heinz is concerned.

The Heinz company has “nothing more to do with politics than Al Gore had to do with Goretex,” Debbie Foster, its vice-president for communications, told The Times. “We don’t want to get into a food fight over this, but we are not a Democratic condiment.”

W Ketchup was dreamt up by Bill Zachary, a New York banker and Republican donor, at a barbecue in April, and is marketed as a patriotic product untainted by any dubious foreign input. It “comes in one flavour: American” while Heinz has “57 foreign factories” — a line to tingle the tasbuds of any neocon. A portion of the sales goes to children of US servicemen killed in Iraq.

Heinz’s website downplays the family’s interest in the business. It says that John H. John Heinz III, the Republican senator who was married to Teresa until he died in a helicopter crash in 1991, worked only briefly in the marketing department, and that the family retains less than a 4 per cent interest in the company.