Heinz is an iconic ketchup brand. That’s the main reason why the brand was viewed as unattainable by small business and communities.

Heinz took advantage of the conversation around Heinz Pickles Ketchup, which consumers claimed to taste like McDonald's. This was our opportunity to directly approach small businesses from the outskirts of cities: McDonald's copycats.

There are 11,540 registered small restaurants in Brazil called MC Something, inspired by the largest fast-food chain in the world, like Mc Point, Mc Turbo, etc. The brand created a relationship with these small businesses helping them to grow and promote themselves in their neighborhoods.

Heinz is the most iconic ketchup brand in the world. This gives the impression that it’s an unattainable product for smaller businesses. Usually, small restaurants use cheaper ketchup of lower quality. This ends up affecting the taste and quality of the hamburgers offered.

But these small restaurants are part of a market of BRL 180 billion, with more than 17 million people, growing 8% per year. Bottom line: for a brand that wants to continue growing in sales volume, in an industry that has stopped growing at 3% in recent years, opening other markets, especially of this size is fundamental.

Our main goal was to enter this market, and the best option was to enter through the small restaurants. Thus, we managed to create a relationship with small businesses and to raise a positive sentiment about Heinz, while increasing product sales in the B2C segment.

One of the brand's growth strategies is to launch new flavors. By coincidence, when we launched Heinz ketchup with pickles, the feedback from consumers on social networks was that it left everything tasting like the world's largest restaurant chain. But, after 40 years of partnership, McDonald's was no longer selling Heinz.

So, if we are no longer in the 850 McDonald’s in Brazil, we saw a great business opportunity to enter more than 11,000 small legal restaurants that already use Mc in their names. They were inspired by McDonald’s, but their burgers didn't taste like those. But now, they could.

The idea was to offer these small stores the Mc flavor while cultivating and strengthening the bond with a new consumer market. Our B2B campaign also strengthened the relationship with consumers and increased sales in the B2C segment. It is a win-win game for Heinz and the Other Mc´s.

Heinz offered these “Mc Somethings” a package including our expertise to improve visual merchandising, ingredient quality, and delivery implementation. In addition, we sold a lot of Heinz ketchup. To promote these small businesses, we helped them customize videos and photos and turn them into commercials starring two namesakes, famous MC’s from funk in Brazil - Mc Don Juan and MC Taya.

In partnership with the CUFA organization (Central Única das Favelas or Slums Central), we set up a squad of micro-influencers from the areas of each small restaurant to be responsible for the distribution of the content.

The first step was to find small burger places, searching for legally registered restaurants in four states. Our field team went into each of them, offering a package of expertise such as visual merchandising, delivery implementation, and ingredients.

In a country leader in TikTok content production, we produced the commercial clips with two famous MCs in Brazil, which could be customized for the promotion of each restaurant involved. In addition, we partnered with CUFA to have micro-influencers distributing this material locally.

We took two months from starting to implement the first initiatives to the launch of the restaurants´ campaigns, in April 2023. Local actions took place in the MC’s neighborhoods, with a nationwide campaign launch.

Heinz's campaign benefited 1105 Other Mc's. We offered them a summed amount of around 5510 hours of consultancy with experts and supplied them with 6.889.053kgof ketchup.

With this campaign, we achieved 67% brand growth and became #1 food product on Amazon Brazil during the campaign. It also resulted in a 42% NPS increase for the Other Mc’s accelerated in the program.

So far, the campaign helped 1105 small burger businesses across the country. They received mentorship, ketchup supply, and materials and had their stores promoted. On the other hand, Heinz was able to enter a new market, with more than 11,000 similar businesses – a huge potential to explore.

This was the successful kickoff of a new and extensive process of entering a new market segment. Besides unlocking a new market potential in Brazil, the campaign is a paradigm shift for Heinz, conveying a more democratic brand approach.

The first manifestations of Brazilian funk began in the 1980s, in the “favelas” of Rio de Janeiro. The songs are used to express the tough reality of people living in favelas. The musical style started to become more known and popular in the 1990s. Some of the songs have been recorded by renowned Brazilian artists.

However, this music style has always been considered “too popular” and, therefore, disregarded by educated and wealthier layers of the population. There are many preconceived ideas about funk, not to mention the stigmas that this musical style carries, due to its black and poor origins.

Brazilian funk still has greater prestige in the slums and poor/peripheral communities, which is why using the word MCs (to refer to funk musicians) and having their participation in this campaign is a situation that naturally increases the visibility among the customers that Heinz wants to impact.