Tomato based stains may look tough, but they’re actually not hard to remove! Whether it’s pizza, marinara, ketchup, or soup, here’s how to get tomato sauce stains out of carpet and upholstery.

Your half-eaten slice of pizza slips off your plate and lands, upside down, on the couch. You pick it up quickly, only to reveal that the pizza sauce has already done its dirty work: there’s a stain on your upholstery!

When it comes to carpet and upholstery stains, the tomato-based type are among the most feared by homeowners. It can take many forms, from pizza sauce to marinara sauce to Bloody Marys. But the good news is that, although tomato-based stains certainly do look bad, they’re actually not difficult to clean in most cases.

As always, try to clean the stain as soon as it occurs. If you don’t, you’re giving those tomato juices extra time to set into the fabric or carpet fiber and dry, making your job more difficult. But even if you don’t notice the stain at first, it’s still possible to clean it after it’s set in. It might just take some extra effort.

Here are the supplies you’ll need:

• A butter knife
• A bucket
• Warm water
• Dish soap
• Two clean cloths or towels, one for wet-blotting and one for drying.
• A spray bottle
• White vinegar

Follow these steps to remove the tomato sauce stain from your upholstery or carpet:

1. Use the butter knife to gently remove any excess sauce from above the carpet or upholstery surface. This is better than using a cloth or paper towel, which can spread and smear the sauce into the fabric.
2. Add a squirt of dish soap to four cups of warm water in your bucket and mix it.
3. Wet one of the towels in the dish soap-water solution and rub at the tomato sauce stain, allowing the stain to absorb into the towel.
4. When the stain is gone, blot dry with the second towel. If you’ve gone through steps 1-4 two or three times and the stain is still there, move onto step 5.
5. Spray undiluted vinegar onto the stain using the spray bottle, and let sit for about twenty minutes.
6. Use a clean towel to blot the vinegar-treated stain.
7. Repeat until stain is gone.

If the stain is very large or well set, you may want to call in the professionals rather than devote all that time to cleaning it yourself. In that case, we’d love to help! Give Five Step Carpet Care a call at 828.237.3237 or get in touch via our contact form.