Latest news with #Ketchup
Forbes
29-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Heinz Is Ketchup, To AI
What happens when you enlist the powerful new technologies we call AI in the service of iconic brands? One example is the achievement of Heinz ketchup in validating their market dominance by showing how art imitates life, and AI imitates humans. On Linkedin, Noor Salam Khan talks about how Heinz 'mastered' generative AI with a ground-breaking ad campaign: 'This campaign wasn't just clever; it was pure genius, reminding us that sometimes, the simplest ideas, when paired with cutting-edge tech, are the most powerful,' Khan writes. 'They put (AI) to the ultimate test. They fed generative AI models (like DALL-E) the simple prompt: 'Draw ketchup.' And guess what? Time and time again, the AI spit out images that were strikingly, unmistakably... Heinz. The bottle shape, the keystone label, that iconic red – it was all there. It was like the AI had gone into the collective consciousness and pulled out the very essence of 'ketchup.'' The Pursuit of Attention So many brands have used AI image creators to present radically attractive or fantastic results, to dress up a company's products and services to inspire a target audience. The color, the pizzazz, the spectacle is what has drawn so many of us to the handiwork of the LLM in a diffusion model, where the program adds noise, prior to de-noising into a novel, coherent result. But Heinz went a step further, asking AI what ketchup looks like, without putting a thumb on the scales. Here, the company was betting that the LLMs, in their mining of human responses and visual environments, would come back with something that looked like Heinz. And it did. Check out the article for the full layout. Yesterday's AI Tools Looking at the campaign itself, you can see how the visuals that AI came up with were so very 2024… That is, Dall-E and similar tools, at that time, were not proficient in creating text. So what you have in many of these results is a recognizable ketchup bottle that has the Heinz keystone label, but with a scramble of letters on it, like: IANCS – KEED – KUP. Or simply: KEMP. Despite this profound lack of spelling prowess, the model did come up with numerous interesting examples of ketchup bottle context, including a ketchup bottle floating in a pool, a bottle that looks like a lava lamp, and a Heinz-like product enshrined in a stained glass window. As the younger generation might say: Noice. Rapid Image Generation Innovation Fast-forward to 2025, and we have a brand-new image generation model with ChatGPT 4o that is actually excellent at writing text, and a lot more precise when it comes to aggregating information for visual creation. So I tried it for myself – I simply asked ChatGPT 4o to draw ketchup. Here's what it came up with: So I asked it, without any further prompting, to add text to the label. Here's where things got interesting – ChatGPT actually asked me what text I would like to add. I asked it to add its own text, and choose its own font. The result? Carefully emblazoned on the photorealistic bottle was the word 'Heinz.' Below it, in the keystone: 'Heinz tomato ketchup.' Now, you could argue that this is simply a numbers game – that the AI returns these results because it can see that more bottles of Heinz are sold on the market than any other kind of ketchup. But as Khan points out, this kind of work 'hits us in the feels' – giving us A very direct sense that Heinz is ketchup. Presumably, only brand dominators can do this, but it also provides other businesses with a lot of potential ideas. In some ways we're embarking in the process of talking to AI, making conversations that include its own thoughts or research, and that's having an impact on nearly every part of our lives. That's what AI integration is really all about – it changes things. We end up coexisting with other intelligent beings, even if they only have hardware instead of human bodies. And we play off of them to inspire ourselves. In some ways, that's what it's all about.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kraft Heinz utilizes 3D printer to adjust iconic bottle design: 'Our team tested over 45 prototypes'
Ketchup bottles in the United Kingdom are getting a new look, as Kraft Heinz has developed a fully recyclable lid with the help of a 3D printer. The cap is the novel piece, pairing a 100% polypropylene design with the previously recyclable bottle to create a circular product container, a company official blogged for The Consumer Goods Forum. The old top included silicone, which made it problematic to recover the plastic that made up the rest of the piece. "This innovative solution eliminated the non-recyclable silicone valve, which contaminates the recycling stream when recycled along with traditional closures, making the entire bottle fully circular," Trenten Huntington, Kraft Heinz senior manager of packaging sustainability, global procurement sustainability, and innovation, wrote. "Our team tested over 45 prototypes to find the optimal solution that balances functionality, ease of use, and aesthetics." Huntington said 185,000 hours of research and development went into the cap. It will be used with more Heinz sauces in Europe and elsewhere. The change also enables a smoother process for the food giant in production and logistics. The lid will supplant 300,000 non-recyclable closures annually, and it provides the same opening and dispensing experience for consumers. The blog noted that, as is true of all recyclables, the reuse of the cap will depend on "consumer education, infrastructure and suitable end markets." If buyers don't understand that the new top can be recycled or "the importance of doing so," for example, the resources that went into it will be for naught. Communities must also have access to collection and sorting, and then the plastic needs to be recoverable and usable in other products. This is a long journey for cheap plastic and often where recycling goes astray. Glass and aluminum are alternatives that don't lose quality in the recycling process and thus can be remade infinitely. In that vein, Kraft Heinz is looking to expand its sustainable and circular offerings, including by turning away from plastic. It would also do well to make the same switch with its U.S. ketchup bottles, just as it did for its famous Shake 'N Bake bags. When you think about a product's packaging, which of these factors is more important to you? The way it looks The information it provides The waste it produces I don't think about packaging at all Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. "We're also exploring other packaging alternatives, including compostable and reusable solutions, that could help close the loop even further," Huntington stated. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Warner Bros. has officially sold the Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme
The Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme won't be rotting away in David Zaslav's basement for the next 50 years. Warner Bros. Discovery has sold the rights to the movie to Ketchup Entertainment, the same company that just released The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Ketchup ponied up around $50 million for the film and it'll hit theaters in 2026, according to reporting by Deadline. Warner Bros. funded the creation of the movie but then shelved it for a tax write-off. You know the drill. It's pretty much the same thing it did with the Batgirl movie and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. Nobody loves scrapping finished projects more than WB. This one, at least, has a happy ending. Coyote vs. Acme always seemed like a pretty nifty concept. It stars Will Forte and John Cena and follows Wile E. Coyote as he sues notorious manufacturer Acme after he repeatedly fails to catch his arch-nemesis, the roadrunner. Directing duties fell to Dave Green, who made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. It was produced by Chris deFaria and James Gunn, with a screenplay by May December scribe Samy Burch. This hasn't stopped Warner Bros. Discovery from feverishly hitting the 'delete' key. It just pulled all of the original Looney Tunes shorts from the streaming platform Max. This happened just as The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was hitting theaters. To be fair, that film didn't exactly blow up the box office.
