#1072 2025 · Heinz (Kraft Heinz), with Zanyi · Retail food / condiments (China)
Heinz made the dish's own egg the ad so the cooking ritual could not skip the pitch
问题
Chinese cooks knew ketchup only as fast-food dip, locking Heinz out of the daily kitchen with no budget for the push
背景
Heinz ketchup had ridden into Chinese homes as the fixed companion of fries and fried chicken — popular in the actual eating, but trapped inside a low-frequency western fast-food occasion. Its penetration sat near 30%: a hundred families, and only about thirty had ketchup. To grow, Heinz had to climb out of the snack niche into the daily kitchen, which in China means 煎炒烹炸 stir-frying, where soy, vinegar and chili rule and a western sauce is simply not in the pantry picture.
A frontal campaign had no chance: buying saturation over the Spring Festival holiday to 're-educate' a cooking culture is a war a single condiment brand cannot win, and the old trick of brand symbols and jingles no longer moves a fragmented, ad-fatigued market. Heinz needed the message to arrive not as an interruption a cook can ignore, but inside the very act of cooking.
换别人会怎么做
Book Spring Festival media — TV, social, out-of-home — to 'teach' Chinese cooks to add ketchup to stir-fries. It is an un-winnable war: saturation against an entrenched cooking culture needs a budget no single sauce can carry, and ads-fatigued consumers' brains delete another branded jingle before dinner.
他们看到了什么
The move was not to buy reach but to make the pitch un-skippable by putting it on the egg, the one ingredient the target dish cannot omit: the recipe itself forces exposure exactly when a shopper buys for the dish
那一手
Heinz partnered with 黄天鹅 (Huang Tiange), a premium 'edible-raw' egg brand, and printed ten genuine consumer stories about 番茄炒蛋 (tomato scrambled egg) onto 10,000 eggs, which were distributed through Hema (盒马) stores nationwide — a product that must be bought and broken for the dish Heinz wanted to enter. The printed egg becomes an ad a shopper cannot skip: buying the dish's indispensable ingredient physically carries the pitch into the kitchen at the exact moment of purchase, and the egg's rarity (stamped, numbered, one-off) makes shoppers photograph and share it, seeding the social loop.
为什么管用
The consumer cannot decline the ad without declining to cook the dish, because the message lives on the dish's one indispensable input. Every shopping trip that stocks for 番茄炒蛋 physically carries the pitch into the kitchen at the exact moment the sauce purchase decision happens, past every skip button an interruptive ad would face. Rarity does the amplification: a stamped, one-off printed egg breaks the monotony of identical cartons, flips the buyer into a sharer, and the resulting UGC reports the proof — 99% of the campaign's reach was unpaid consumer content, the consumer's own photo standing in as the medium's certificate. The partner's shelf-stacking and store placement distribute it for free, coupling Heinz's message to a channel it could never have bought at that cost.
值了多少
Per the campaign's own filing: 160M+ impressions (99% UGC), co-mentions of Heinz with the dish +308%, Douyin ketchup sales +114%, share 31.8%.
什么时候会失灵
It needs a single indispensable ingredient that reliably precedes the target behavior — eaters improvising a dish, or a recipe with no fixed input, leave the medium with nowhere to sit. Printing on a fragile food surface is technically and legally fragile (limits how many can be made and where they can be sold). And the effect rides on the partner: without an egg brand willing and able to carry it into stores, the whole enforcement collapses onto an idea with no distribution.
后来呢
Heinz pulled the recipe's indispensable ingredient into the message and made the partner egg brand's store presence and the cook's own ritual distribute it — so the campaign kept functioning wherever the dish was made, long after the media spots ended.
资料来源
- [1]数英 对话亨氏×黄天鹅：借「番茄炒蛋」出圈，一颗鸡蛋如何撬动UGC？DIGITALING 数英, 2025digitaling.com
- [2]FoodTalks 对话亨氏×黄天鹅：借「番茄炒蛋」出圈，一颗鸡蛋如何撬动UGC？（Morketing）Morketing (via FoodTalks), 2025foodtalks.cn
- [3]亨氏携手黄天鹅，将番茄炒蛋故事印在鸡蛋上36Kr, 202536kr.com
流传很广，但只有部分可考。按传闻收录。