People have been mixing sauces on the side of their plates for as long as there have been plates. Heinz knows it. Some of its best work starts with spotting what fans already do and turning it up.
So when it asked which combos to bottle next, more than 80,000 people voted, and MayoRacha, MayoMust and MayoCue hit the shelves. The brief was to now get them into the fridges of 18 to 44 year olds.
I worked with The Kitchen, Kraft Heinz's award-winning in-house creative agency, on how to launch them.
We came up with a few routes. One was a Secret Sauce Society. Another was built around Mash Up Songs. The third tapped into the craze for challenge shows. Squid Game. Taskmaster. Physical 100.
It wasn't even close.
Three sauces. Three creators. A fight for the votes. Welcome to the Sauce Games.
We developed the idea into a short-form TikTok game show, produced by WXY. America Foster took MayoRacha. Morgan M-James went to war for MayoMust. Abraham Bunga repped MayoCue.
Blindfolds on. Burgers built by feel. Sauce going everywhere except the bun. Strangers stopped in the street and made to pick a side. The trash talk started before round one was over, right there in the captions.
When the confetti settled, MayoRacha took the crown.
But the real winner was Heinz. 3M+ views in 72 hours.