Less than a year ago, Heinz opened its most important ingredient to the world: its tomatoes. It did so under the concept (and philosophy) of 'Open Sauce'. The new line of Heinz Culinary Tomatoes (for cooking developers) was launched with the promise that it could improve any recipe. Yes, any recipe. Months later, it was time to put this to the test. We needed to make a product demonstration, but in a way that aligned with the tech-inspired philosophy the brand was built on.

AI can do amazing things (so much so that people even fear it will take their jobs!), but cooking is not (yet) one of them. When AI was asked to generated food images, strange things (like monstrous tomatoes) were produced.

That’s why, to prove that Heinz Tomatoes elevate any dish, we decided to start by improving the ones that needed it most: the digital ones.

To help AI master cooking, we created the first recipe book for AI—and for humans too. We crafted the prompts AI needs to generate more than 30 recipes using Heinz Tomatoes and then compiled them into a traditional recipe book that's anything but traditional.

People could then copy the prompts we created and test them out for themselves. The output? Deliciously Heinz tomato-based recipes.

Heinz is the #1 brand for Tomato Ketchup globally and has over 150 years of expertise in tomatoes, we know we have the best tomatoes, they’re so good we even have our own seeds.

But a picture is literally worth a thousand words. And instead of claiming we’re the best, we decided to demonstrate it. With AI we had the opportunity to demonstrate how everything (including food photos) improves with our Heinz Tomatoes.

We brought Heinz chefs together with an AI expert to create specific prompts that could help AI generate better food images. A specific Heinz Culinary Tomato product name was featured in each of these prompts, proving that Heinz Tomatoes truly are the reason that AI now can cook better.

We taught AI how to "cook" more than 30 recipes, which we compiled in a recipe book designed for both artificial intelligence and humans. Each recipe uses Heinz Tomatoes as a key ingredient.

Following the open-source philosophy (as we like to call it: Open Sauce), we made the book available for anyone to download for free, via a dedicated website that we built to host this cookbook: https://aicookbook.heinz.co.uk/recipes

Even though the campaign was launched in the UK where the products are available, the book was downloaded from all over the world. And while we made the cookbook for AI, it travelled all the way to chefs in France, winning the 2024 Gourmand award for best cookbook of the year.

The launch was accompanied by witty social posts, with an average 6.5% CTR (vs 2-3% benchmark), landing consumers on our dedicated website where they could test out the prompts themselves.

How can we prove that AI has enhanced cooking skills following this campaign? As AI tools are exposed to more data and situations, they learn from the experiences, store information and improve their ability to perform the task they were asked to do. By giving AI our perfect prompts, AI has stored this information and is better equipped to produce delicious food images next time someone tries cooking with AI.

- Won the 2024 Gourmand Award for Best Cookbook and Winebook of the Year.

- Improved Heinz Masterbrand key brand attributes: “is a modern brand” (+4.2pp); “makes my food more exciting” (+6.4pp); “worth paying more” (+3.4pp).

- 5000+ images were generated using the cookbook’s prompts. 

- Reached lifestyle and tech magazines, putting Heinz in the centre of cultural topics with millennials foodies.

- Paid social CTR: 6.5% vs 2-3% benchmark.