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Given its iconicity, one would think that people simply trust Heinz. Yet, when conducting social listening and interviews with Gen-Z, we found that even though they loved Heinz ketchup, they didn’t trust how it was made. Worst yet, some believed that Heinz wasn’t made with real tomatoes.

 

This belief could not be farther from the truth. 

 

After visiting Heinz farms, we discovered an obsessive agricultural culture that went to extreme lengths to not only make ketchup, but tomatoes. In fact, Heinz is the only company in the world that owns the entire ketchup making process from seed to tomato to ketchup – more still, they breed a proprietary Heinz tomato seed to produce redder, thicker, tastier tomatoes.

 

Objective: shift the perception of how Heinz is made – from factories to real people that make products with irrational love.

 

Insight: People irrationally love our ketchup because we go to irrational lengths to make the best tomatoes in the world.

 

Strategy: We irrationally love tomatoes so you can irrationally love ketchup.

 

FROM TOMATO MASTER TO INTERNET FAMOUS

As the Heinz global platform is grounded in telling true stories, we decided to cast a real employee: Hector Osorno, Head of Tomato Technology.

 

No one loves Heinz more than Hector. An expert with over 33 years in the field, Hector knows tomatoes so well that he considers them not fruits or vegetables, but friends. 

 

Through a social series of 5 videos, we captured his expertise, charm, and obsession in a way that for the first time, humanized Heinz to the next generation of customers. 

 

RESULTS:

To our surprise, people across TikTok and Instagram became completely obsessed with Hector. They clamored for Hector plushies, spammed the Heinz account for more Hector videos, and claimed “I love Hector more than my parents”. The series garnered 28.08M impressions, 99% positive sentiment, and received over 283K comments in just 2 weeks.  Most importantly, people began to shift their perceptions of how Heinz is made – not in a factory, but with real Heinz tomatoes.

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