Restaurants have been refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheaper generic ketchup for decades. The Heinz bottle carries enough brand equity that diners rarely question what is inside it. A table with a Heinz bottle reads as quality regardless of whether the contents are authentic. That assumption is what restaurants exploited and what Heinz, in 2023, decided to turn into a campaign.
How the Fraud Works
The practice is widespread across Turkey, the United States, and multiple other markets. Small street food restaurants and larger chains alike run out of Heinz ketchup and, rather than ordering more, refill the bottle with a no-name alternative that costs significantly less. The customer sees the Heinz bottle, never questions it, and eats ketchup that is not Heinz. The brand’s reputation takes the damage if the inferior product disappoints. The restaurant saves money.
The problem first entered public consciousness at scale when a Snapchat video of a restaurant worker pouring generic ketchup into a Heinz bottle went viral. Social media filled quickly with similar accounts, with TikTok and Instagram Reels documenting the practice across markets. Nando’s had faced scrutiny over the same issue in 2016, eventually issuing a public clarification that it only uses authentic Heinz. The behaviour was documented, but the brand had no mechanism to prove it or stop it.
The Label of Truth
Wunderman Thompson Turkey, working for Heinz in Turkey, where the fraud was most acute, identified the brand’s own product as the solution. Heinz ketchup has an exact, proprietary Pantone red. No generic ketchup matches it precisely. The agency added a colour-matched border to the Heinz label, using the exact Pantone shade of authentic Heinz ketchup, so that when the label sits against the product inside the bottle, the colours align. If the ketchup inside is not Heinz, the colour will not match, and the label will visually expose the substitution.
The campaign, titled “Is That Heinz?”, launched in Turkey in March 2023. New bottles with the Label of Truth were distributed to restaurants across the country. Simultaneously, Heinz launched an Instagram filter that customers could point at any bottle in a restaurant to check whether the ketchup inside matched the Pantone reference on the label. The filter made every Heinz customer a potential fraud investigator at their own table.
The Crowdsourced Campaign in North America
In parallel, Canadian agency Rethink developed a separate but connected campaign in the United States called Ketchup Fraud. The campaign invited consumers to tag restaurants caught refilling Heinz bottles on the brand’s Instagram page, with the most-tagged restaurant to hear from Heinz directly. Out-of-home activations ran in New York and Chicago alongside social, newspaper, and magazine advertising. The campaign was built from the same Snapchat video that had seeded the public conversation, turning a viral moment of documented fraud into a formal brand campaign.
Mike Dubrick, Chief Creative Officer at Rethink, described the strategic logic: “Consumer demand is really what drives interest for restaurants to carry the product, and Ketchup Fraud finds a way to create consumer demand in the eyes of the restaurateurs, so that these business owners see the value of the Heinz brand and not just ketchup as a commodity.”
The Results
The Label of Truth campaign was named one of AdAge’s Top 5 Campaigns You Need to Know About Right Now in 2023. According to VML, which had absorbed Wunderman Thompson Turkey by the time of reporting, 97% of consumers were able to tell authentic Heinz from imitations after the campaign launched. Non-Heinz ketchup refills in street food restaurants in Turkey dropped by 73%. Heinz ketchup usage among those same restaurants increased by 24%. The Instagram filter generated 100,000 organic shares. The TikTok live activity around the campaign reached 800,000 viewers.
The campaign solved a commercial problem that most brands in the same position would have addressed through legal enforcement or supply chain pressure. Heinz solved it by making the brand’s own product colour the verification tool, giving consumers the means to expose fraud themselves, and turning a reputational liability into one of the brand’s strongest campaign platforms in recent years.
Campaign Name: “Is That Heinz?” / Label of Truth / Ketchup Fraud
Agency Name: Wunderman Thompson Turkey / VML (Label of Truth) / Rethink Canada (Ketchup Fraud)
Brand Name: Heinz / Kraft Heinz
Location: Turkey (Label of Truth); United States (Ketchup Fraud campaign); Global digital distribution
