2022 Heinz’s Tomato Pasta Sauce launch brought growth to a stagnated category dominated by own label. Despite outstanding debut, one year is very early stages for an innovation and there was still lot of room to grow.

Heinz’s main objectives for 2023, therefore, were to accelerate the growth for both the brand and the category and to keep Heinz Pasta Sauce momentum in the conversations.

The inspiration for the campaign came while researching new recipes. “Penne alla vodka” still features among the top trendy recipes on social media, two years after a viral post from Gigi Hadid. Heinz identified the opportunity and immediately brought it to the agency, which promptly collaborated by recommending the best partner for it.

By launching this innovation, Heinz and Absolut collaboration benefited from the residual buzz around vodka pasta sauce recipes without having to invest a single pound to create interest and ignite social conversation.

After the successful launch under “Ridiculously late, ridiculously good”, this was the opportunity to follow-up: Even that recipe was posted two years ago, it was still getting millions of views and posts. It wasn’t too late. The perfect opportunity to refresh the conversation we started last year.

This time, we needed a partner. Which brand was at the level of Heinz in terms of iconicity and could be part of pop culture? This was the breakthrough moment: it had to be Absolut. An iconic brand, like Heinz.

It was the last ingredient to produce a winning recipe: native social trend + celebrities + Heinz + Absolut.

Our PR strategy was built on six key principles to make the launch worth sharing:

- Cultural fluency: leveraging the hype of a viral trend started by a celebrity.

- Iconicity: the iconic Absolut adverts become the creative reference, while nodding to Heinz’ Pasta Sauce campaign.

- Desire: We seeded the launch in the social ecosystem first, through selected influencers and media partners, sending them a unique and exclusive box with the new product.

- Scarcity: ahead of the launch we made available a very limited quantity of the product and gave people the chance to pre-order it on-line to secure their chance to grab one.

- Premiumness: the product was available in selected premium stores, for a limited time only and at a premium price.

- Scarcity: we seeded this limited-edition pasta sauce to influencers ahead of the launch and gave people the chance to pre-order it on-line to

We searched for a perfect balance between the imaginary of both brands, by using the most iconic silhouette of advertising to structure the visuals, integrating our product in it. And we used ingredients related to the sauce to compose or accompany this silhouette.

We wanted to rise the value of the collaboration and to pay homage to the old school manners; making it look organic, so no CGI was used in the process.

Once we had the visuals, we handcrafted every single detail: we got a tomato plant to communicate the key ingredient of Heinz, we played with spaghetti to highlight the perfect match for our sauce, and we shot a range of cheeses along with a food container to highlight the foodiness of our product. 3 posters that were published in OOH formats trough U.K.

The result of this collaboration was absolutely astonishing.

Even though sales weren’t the main objective, the product reached 50 units per store per week (vs. an average of 7) and doubled projected sales. It was the brand’s top product (ahead of Ketchup) becoming the leading pasta sauces brand in Waitrose during the launch period.

In terms of bringing excitement to the category, this collaboration performed far beyond expectations:

- More than 0.5 billion earned media impressions in a very short limited time

- 52% uplift on the whole range sales driven by the product

- Immediate social conversation, especially on Tiktok, where #absolutelyheinz reached 6.6M views

- Creating new relationships with 200 influencers who proactively reached the brand.

Record launch in Heinz to Home (5500 jars sold out) and whole stock sold out in Waitrose, with Heinz having to double production.