The Godfather Pasta Sauce idea goes beyond product innovation. It’s an unexpected experience born to shake the category.

An unpredictive collaboration that led Heinz to tap into culture, with a relevant role: bringing to life a recipe that only existed on screens.

Borrowing entertainment communication codes.

Yes, we mean pasta sauces at the cinema.

We hosted the 1st premiere for a pasta sauce, with + 300M earned impressions. And created our own corner at the cinema.

And brought the experience to the store, recreating the Corleone office at Waitrose, giving consumers the chance of sitting behind the famous desk.

Heinz is a long-established, highly trusted brand in the UK market. From baked beans to ketchup, the brand is a British household staple.

Yes, also in Buckingham Palace. Along its history it has established a clear and recognizable TOV based on its witty personality. 

In order to bring excitement to the pasta category, it was key to embrace creativity at the speed of culture, hopping onto TikTok trends and cultural moments relevant for the audience.

2022 Heinz’s Tomato Pasta Sauce launch brought growth to a stagnated category dominated by own label. Despite outstanding debut, there was still lot of room to grow.  

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

After launching an epic collaboration with Absolut and after igniting the online debate with a ketchup pasta sauce, Heinz needed to keep shaking the category with their "Ridiculously Good" pasta sauces. Maintaining the brand in the conversation and growing attention towards it.

Pasta Sauces was boring until we landed on it, so needed to keep the fun going by generating some noise (as well as sales, obviously). 

To do so, we leveraged social media conversation and proposed Heinz and Paramount a partnership they couldn’t refuse: bringing to life the most iconic film recipe ever... Heinz The Godfather Pasta Sauce! Ridiculously irrefusable.

A culture-led idea brought to life through our successful brand platform “Ridiculously good” by leveraging the movie’s highly recognizable communication codes “Ridiculously Irrefusable”.

The idea was inspired by a social media trend: #foodfrommovies. Consumers were already recreating a popular recipe that existed long before Instagram or Pinterest - Clemenza’s instructions to cook a pasta sauce in The Godfather.

The same recipe that fans started to recreate on TikTok 50 years later, following a viral trend.

From that trend, and following Heinz Pasta Sauces disruptive strategy that was kicked off three years ago, we literally jumped into culture in a relevant way, leveraging cinema’s communication codes to present our new product and creating new commerce opportunities.

Targeting all Godfather fans in the country, the product became the message itself.

During Oscars season, we launched the pasta sauce jar for consumers to purchase exclusively on heinztohome.co.uk, Waitrose and Ocado for five weeks only.

To surprise our consumers, we recreated a corner of the Corleone family office in Waitrose Canary Wharf store, where everyone had a chance of playing the Godfather, sitting behind the famous desk – an Instagrammable moment for fans!

We also hosted the 1st ever premiere for a pasta sauce in the history of cinema. An exclusive event presented at the iconic Vue Cinemas, attended by 200 guests including influencers, press media, retail, and agency partners. The guests experienced a Heinz and Godfather themed evening where they not only got to taste the new pasta sauce but also enjoyed a special screening of The Godfather movie. The event coverage from influencers achieved a 3.6% engagement rate 3X times higher than ever achieved on previous Heinz activations.

A real sauced based on the most awarded fiction. With blockbuster results.

- Heinz x The Godfather pasta sauce overtakes Pasta sauces category in Waitrose & Ocado:

--- #1 SKU in Pasta Sauce category in Waitrose, outperforming the next best SKU by +21%!

--- ‘Godfather’ became a trending search term on Ocado, in the top 20 most searched terms, with conversion of 74% vs 60% average.

- Heinz x The Godfather pasta sauce achieved 22.7% market share with our campaign.

- Over 300M earned media impressions and over 9.5M impressions via influencer earned content on social media.

- Paid media campaign also overdelivered on our ambitions:

--- Meta: + 35% reach vs target.

--- Tiktok: +166% vs target in click through rate.