THING: Heinz
Something weird is happening to the world’s favourite ketchup, soup and baked bean brand. In fact, it’s starting to look like they have lost their mindz.
EXHIBIT A: Their latest ad campaign seems to suggest that people will take tins of baked beans on a plane for a hen night:
This is insane. Unless you and your mates are planning to sing a rousing chorus of Man, I Feel Like A Woman with your bums, why you would pay £29.99 each way on Easyjet for this when you could fill the extra bag with booze, inflatable willies and drugs?
But that’s nothing compared to EXHIBIT B. I really can’t think of a single place you’d want to take this. The toilet, maybe?
I’d been alerted to this ill-judged Halloween monster earlier in the week, and finally found it in the wild in Iceland (the shop, not the country - although I can just imagine this flob exploding from the earth’s core and destroying a small village).
What’s most disturbing about it though, is that it’s not really a one-off. It’s part of a targeted and deliberate escalation of wacky brand activity that one day is going to end in saucy bloodshed. In the last year, we’ve had limited edition Barbie-cue sauce, Heinz ketchup coloured paint, Absolut vodka and tomato sauce, Cathedral City Cheezy beans and a deeply crap collab with Primark. That’s on top of the constant Frankensteining of their product range, which includes Beans Jalfrezi, Bacon ketchup, MAYOMUST (which sounds like a type of Victorian mould), MAYOCHUP (KETCHAISSE?), MAYORACHA and this, EXHIBIT C:
Did I buy it? Well, yes. Maybe I just wanted to be part of the Heinz action - the way people instinctively walk towards the scene of a disaster? I also, for research purposes only, bought these:
Both the pickle ketchup and the sausage sarnie crisps were surprisingly edible, but a bit on the tart side. My personal theory is that Heinz have got themselves a surplus of vinegar from somewhere and they need to use it up. So get ready for Sarsons x Heinz Chippy Sauce, MAYOBRINE, Farrow & Ball Pickled Onion Wallpaper Paste and Balsamic Beanz that you can pack in your suitcase to go to a funeral.
VERDICT: Anyone know the Heinzlich manoeuvre?
MR KIPLING’S SIGNATURE COLLECTION
Well, well, well… what do we have here? Mr Kipling walking into the ambassador’s reception in a top hat and tails? Reeking of the money he’s been making off the back of selling Angel Slices for a thousand pounds each during a cost of living crisis? I SEE.
It was only a matter of time before Kipling tried to crack the dinner party circuit by making everything dark purple and saying the words ‘gooey’ and ‘indulgent’. Obviously we’re talking the very lowest rung of the aspirational ladder here, somewhere between Lily O’Brien’s truffles and Baylis and Harding hand wash, but still, for Mr Kipling fans, this is the Met Ball.
However, there’s no way I’m going to buy into this cynical attempt to woo new, sophisticated buyers, not when I’ve been rinsed so often for their basic range. So once again I’m boycotting Kipling and his evil business strategies. I refuse to line the pockets of this rampant megalomaniac!
(Let’s gloss over the fact that earlier this week I discovered Mr Kipling’s new Moreish Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake and ate fistfuls of it in the bath.)
VERDICT: Kipling rivalry
A MESSAGE FROM THE LUCYVERSE
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Mr Kipling Signature Collection! Classy! Awaiting the ambassador’s reception TV ad with goo cake mountain on a silver platter.
Down here in New Zealand we miss out on these delights. But I wonder if I can persuade my English colleague to pack some in her bag before she returns from her visit home.