Heinz is the world’s most beloved ketchup. It’s a thick, rich sauce unlike any other, which is why we’ve long said, “It Has to be Heinz.”

But as the global cost of living rises, everyone is feeling the pressures of inflation, meaning both businesses and consumers are cutting costs. In tough times restaurants often look to cheaper alternatives of lesser quality and taste than Heinz.

Our objective was to reinforce brand love for Heinz in order to show restaurants that while there are other ketchups, none of them can replace Heinz.

We launched Ketchup Fraud, an integrated campaign that called out restaurants refilling Heinz bottles with generic ketchup. It featured caught-in-the-act style assets and a twist on our tagline: Even when it isn’t Heinz, it has to be Heinz. From there, we called on our fans to help us find restaurants committing Ketchup Fraud, so that we could get them the real deal. We didn’t just want to bring attention to Ketchup Fraud – we wanted to end it.

Our strategy was to subvert a pain point to reaffirm our brand truth: It has to be Heinz. Through social listening, we uncovered a widespread consumer pain point: restaurants have been refilling Heinz bottles with generic ketchup and people could tell. Across social, people expressed their frustration and disappointment with this inferior ketchup swap. Instead of doing what brands typically do and shy away from this behaviour, we leaned into it to rally Heinz fans and stop it for good. We knew we didn’t need to say “It has to be Heinz” if we got our fans to say it for us.

We started by bringing attention to Ketchup Fraud through social, DOOH, print and video assets. Placements included high-impact DOOH in both New York & Chicago, along with a New York Times full-page feature and placements in US Weekly, InTouch and Life & Style.

Once the word was out, we turned to social and asked fans to tell us which restaurants have been committing ketchup fraud. Then we began connecting with these restaurants and are providing them with the real deal to make sure that when people see Heinz – it will actually be Heinz.

Our OOH assets ran for a week at the end of March and we have a second phase scheduled for this summer. Social assets continued through April.

By tapping into an insight that resonated with Heinz fans across the world, our campaign drove 92% positive sentiment, exceeded the social engagement rate benchmark by 128x, and brought to life hundreds of organic stories and anecdotes that confirmed first-hand experiences with Ketchup Fraud.

With the launch of this campaign, Heinz gained 33 new accounts in under a month, including resigning Boston's iconic Fenway ballpark, increased Heinz sales by 8% vs the previous year, and gained 0.6 points in market share vs. the previous year, at a time when many were turning away from higher priced products.