Thai people love spicy food and cook chili sauce with all kinds of menu. However, this love leans toward Thai local chili brands, resulting in Heinz chili sauce coming in fourth place of the market. Consumers perceived Heinz as a foreign brand that doesn’t understand the local taste enough to be the chili sauce expert.

The market of Thai chili sauce is compared based on the chili hotness level. However, what we lack in hotness, we make up with quality. Thai housewives believe in Heinz reputation as having the most superior quality, based on their trust with the ketchup line. Heinz decided to introduce a new standard in the chili sauce market, selecting only the freshest chili to put into the bottle.

The objective: To establish the new criteria of choosing chili sauce that the best isn’t based on hotness level, but the chili inside must be the “freshest”.

At Heinz, the first priority is to make chili sauce that Thais love. Therefore, we picked only the high-quality chilies to make the freshest and tastiest chili sauce. Due to the high standard, there are many chilies that are left unqualified and wasted.

This is why Heinz decided to give those poor chilies a second chance to become something good, by creating the Unfresh Chili Collection for housewives. There are 3 innovations:

Chili Pain Relief Cream – Chili is known for its hot sensation on the skin that enhances Thai housewives popular activity of massaging after a long, tiring day.

Hot Chili Scrub – Chili is strongly associated with beauty as Thais used it to enhance skin infection, allowing housewives to take care of themselves.

Chili Cursing Set for housewives who want to keep away the unwanted person (A reference to Thai belief of burning chili and salt).

The target consumers of Heinz are housewives who are the decision-makers of the household. Upon in-depth interviews, we found that super-selective housewives who enjoy cooking set high standards in choosing every ingredient to be “fresh, clean, and least chemical”. However, these standards haven’t applied with chili sauce selection, which they only select based-on the spiciness level. To change their behavior, Heinz chili expertise must be shown in ways that they can truly experience.

We look into super-selective housewives lifestyle and found that they have time to take care of everything, but themselves. These housewives must balance between their jobs, household duties, and children. Heinz decided to enhance housewives' experience with chilies that aren’t fresh enough to be qualified for Heinz bottle. By finding utility in the leftover chilies, Heinz has strengthened the brand reputation as the chili expertise and win over Thai housewives' hearts.

Heinz created “Unfresh Chili Collection” which made use of unfresh chili that isn't fresh enough to be Heinz Chili Sauce, but they are fresh enough to become products that enhance the lives of super-selective housewives. The set contains three products that have been researching the products that housewives need the most.

We launched the collection through an online film that tells storytelling about the progress to make Heinz Chili Sauce. Then, the collection has been given out through activity on the Heinz Facebook page, in which 500 housewives will receive this collection by sharing their own tips to "preserved freshness" (the word fresh in Thai context also means "youthful").

The Heinz Unfresh Chili Collection has hit trending on social media as soon as it was launched. The collection has become an instant favorite for super-selective housewives and their most needed collection. We send out 500 collections but gain 40K activation participants. The number of people who searches for “Heinz Chili Sauce” increased by 102% and product sales increased by 87%. The total campaign has earned 110 million impressions, 969K engagement, and earned free media worth 20.8 million baht. Most importantly, Heinz successfully has transformed the old perception and become an expert on chilies. Changing their criteria for picking the chilies sauce based on hotness, to considering the freshest as the best quality.