CondimentIQ, a Chicago-based startup operating out of a former meatpacking warehouse in Fulton Market, has announced a $14 million Series A funding round for what it calls “the world’s first context-aware condiment”: a bottle of ketchup equipped with sensors, a small onboard processor, and a proprietary machine learning model trained to detect whether the user is about to put ketchup on a hot dog.

If it determines that you are, the bottle locks.

“We’ve solved one of Chicago’s oldest cultural problems with technology,” said CondimentIQ CEO and co-founder Derek Huang at a product demo Wednesday morning, holding a sleek, matte-black bottle that looked less like a condiment and more like something you’d find in a Silicon Valley bathroom. “Our SmartKetchup uses a combination of computer vision, plate-surface analysis, and contextual food recognition to determine what you’re eating. If it’s a hot dog, the cap engages a magnetic lock and the bottle will not dispense.”

The bottle, which retails for $79.99 and requires a $4.99 monthly subscription for “cloud-based condiment analytics,” uses a small camera embedded in the cap to scan the plate below. The AI model, trained on over two million images of Chicago-area meals, can reportedly distinguish between a hot dog, a burger, fries, and “most casseroles” with 94 percent accuracy.

“The remaining six percent is mostly brats,” Huang acknowledged. “Brats are a gray area, culturally and technologically.”

Chicago’s unofficial ban on putting ketchup on hot dogs is one of the city’s most fiercely held culinary traditions. While not actually codified into law—despite multiple tongue-in-cheek attempts—the taboo is taken seriously enough that many hot dog stands in the city simply do not stock ketchup, and those that do often keep it behind the counter like a controlled substance.

Early testers have reported mixed results. The bottle successfully locked during hot dog scenarios in most trials, but also reportedly refused to dispense during a pasta dinner (“it thought the sausage was a hot dog”), locked permanently during a Fourth of July barbecue (“sensory overload,” per the company’s troubleshooting guide), and, in one case, dispensed unprompted onto a salad, which the company attributed to “a firmware issue that has since been resolved.”

Food critics and technologists have responded with the kind of enthusiasm typically reserved for novelty products that are extremely fun to argue about. “Is this necessary? Absolutely not,” wrote Chicago Eater food columnist Diane Pryce. “Will I buy one? Absolutely yes.”

Not everyone is amused. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council issued a statement praising the company’s “commitment to condiment integrity” while noting that “technology should enhance the hot dog experience, not gatekeep it.” Several ketchup-on-hot-dog advocates—who do exist, though they tend to keep a low profile in Chicago—have called the product “discriminatory” and “an affront to personal freedom.”

CondimentIQ says it plans to expand the SmartKetchup line to include mustard and relish variants by 2027, though Huang was quick to clarify that those bottles will dispense freely. “Mustard and relish belong on a hot dog,” he said. “We’re not monsters.”