Kraft Heinz’s in-house agency, The Kitchen, is an award-winning powerhouse, but why?

At The Drum Awards 2023, The Kitchen cleaned up. Within the Social Media Awards it won Disruptive or Innovative Idea or Stunt and Real Time Response or Activation, as well as scooping the Grand Prix prize for ‘Fridge v Cupboard’ (see video below). Within the Digital Industries Awards, it won in Food and Drink, Social Media and the special Chair Award. Overall, this is a staggering achievement that made us want to know how it did it. And, lo and behold, it just won two more gongs at The Drum Awards 2024.

Winning has to do with having a tacit understanding of the brand that The Kitchen was set up to work for. As The Kitchen head of agency Alex Wade puts it: “We connect our brands with our audience through the lens of culture.”

He talks about “creating acts, not ads, that truly move people, culture and ultimately our business.” These acts – as we’ll get into – drive high levels of engagement with Heinz products through stunts, which engage fans of the brand online and in the real world in irreverent ways. This alone gives The Kitchen London “a well-defined lane” within the roster of agencies that work with Kraft Heinz, Wade adds.

In terms of where it sits alongside other agencies, Wade says it doesn’t go up against them for work. “We often work in unison.”

The genesis of The Kitchen’s work isn’t usually from the handing out of briefs or pitching against other rostered agencies. Rather, it generates a lot of its own work by being proactive and lending an ear to brand managers to “get to know their priorities inside and out,” Wade says. This understanding is then coupled with The Kitchen team’s cultural nous and understanding of trends in the wider world. From this point, ideas start to percolate.

Tapping into consumers’ “irrational love” for Heinz

One recent example is the Heinz Ketchup phone case, which was inspired by the viral Rhode lip balm case. Simply, beauty brand Rhode created a phone case with a lip balm attachment. “It chimed with our brand positioning, which is irrational love,” says Wade.

He can rattle off a number of celebrities who proudly share that irrational love. “Adele carries a sachet of Heinz Tomato Ketchup in her bag wherever she goes… and when Ringo Starr went to India to record with The Beatles, he took a suitcase full of beans”.

After a mockup of a ketchup-carrying phone case was made and shared on socials, the momentum of the lip balm stunt gave Heinz its own viral wave.

“The team thought, ‘OK, we’ve got something here, let’s double down.’ We found a 3D printer, made a version and asked our followers what they thought. Again, there was a positive response, so we made more and offered them to our fans, influencers and celebrities. Suddenly we reached a whole new audience in a way that meaningfully connects our brand in an authentic way to a cultural movement.” With a 97% positive sentiment response and a 2.5x engagement response for the brand, it chalked that one up as a success.

It’s a good example of how The Kitchen likes to push ideas as far as they’ll go until they reach what Wade calls “a natural crescendo.”

Sometimes, it’s a simple idea well executed. The Beanz Etiquette campaign was born out of research that Brits are obsessed with meal etiquette, as are fans of Heinz Beanz. Etiquette expert William Hanson was brought in and then a social debate created that put Heinz Beans at the center of the conversation, resulting in a 5% sales lift when the campaign went live.

This kind of work is not just happening in London. The Kitchen employs around 200 people globally, servicing nine markets around the world including North America, Europe, Australia, China and Brazil, where they have studios in each country.

In the London studio, it is working on local rather than global campaigns as “culture is built from the ground up rather than the top down,” says Wade. “If we identify the potential for an idea to travel across borders, however, we won’t hesitate to connect with our teams in other markets,” he adds. The phone case stunt, for example, was pushed out to colleagues in other markets.

The UK and US Kitchens have similar focuses, share ideas and overlap where there is a shared cultural insight on audiences. Operationally, they respond to local markets, “united by our shared goal of culture-first, audience-driven communications,” adds Wade.

Harnessing creativity to drive business growth

Kraft Heinz’s marketing and commercial director Thiago Rapp has a perspective on the brand and The Kitchen’s work globally. He puts the uplift in award-winning work to not really thinking about winning awards.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve made a purposeful (and effective) change in our culture around creativity, moving from a company where creativity helps win awards to one that harnesses creativity to drive business growth,” he says.

He pinpoints the focus on creative effectiveness, combined with improved in-house capabilities, as having helped achieve Global Heinz sales growth of +12%. This has been reflected in winning big at The Drum Awards but also scooping a record number of Lions at Cannes and, most recently, Kraft Heinz being named as “one of the most innovative companies of 2024” by Fast Company.

For Rapp, The Kitchen London is a unique proposition. “It gives us a creative edge when it comes to brand communication.” Rapp speaks of how it has democratized the creative process by being able to work with brand teams and marketing teams to “tap into knowledge and perspectives across the business.”

Ideas can be green-lit quickly, too. “Its physical proximity to the brand and marketing teams means that when it identifies a trend, it can come to us immediately with an idea to leverage it.”.

From Wade’s perspective, it’s the creative freedom that makes the relationship with others in Heinz work so well and this is built on trust. “If there’s no trust between other teams and The Kitchen team, the model just wouldn’t work.”

The likes of creatives, strategists and social media experts across The Kitchen team love the brand as much as the brand managers, which means they know where they can and can’t push ideas, Wade has observed.

“Obviously, they understand the brief, but they understand the ‘why’ behind the brief, the business challenges, the business objectives and how they translate into marketing objectives. That inherent understanding of the business challenges comes from being an in-house team.”

And just in case you were wondering, it only hires fans of the brand or people who have a positive relationship with it. “We’re lucky though. As a brand with 90% penetration, it’s not hard to find people who have a positive relationship with it.”

Winning awards is unlikely to be a goal in itself for anyone, but for Wade, “it’s definitely a welcome byproduct of a business-wide shift in focus to the belief that creativity can be a differentiator and therefore can lead to business results.” (Pictured above, The Kitchen London receives its special Grand Prix and Chair awards).

Pushing ideas as far as possible

It seems that commitment to an idea and taking it as far as it can go is another part of delivering high-impact (and award-winning) work.

“We talk a lot about doubling down on our creativity and what that means is we find a really nice cultural insight that kind of hits that sweet spot I described you, then put it out into the world, let’s say, on social and see how our audience react to it, see how it resonates,” says Wade.

If it’s working, it keeps going. “It’s about having the confidence to keep growing it and shaping it with our partners and the brand team until suddenly you’ve got something that is impacting our audience in a meaningful way.”

In terms of how far it can go, there’s scope as long as it looks as though it’s still going to have an impact and, if it does, it will be taken to some fairly wild conclusions. A case in point was the Cold Beanz campaign.

“The starting point was the observation that a large proportion of the UK admit to eating cold beans; it’s something like 20% of buyers. This is obviously a talking point that we could lean into.” The insight was taken to the brand team and then a proposition created around the idea that only Heinz Beanz is of high enough quality to be enjoyed cold.

The idea was scaled through several rounds of activation. “We ended up creating flash mobs around the UK to be spotted eating cold beans to try and drive that conversation, and we were on the front page of a couple of papers as a result.”

It turns out Australians are partial to cold beans, too. “We’re able to export the idea across borders as well,” adds Wade.