The film is on Heinz's own YouTube channel. The Grand Prix, though, was won by the posters.
Heinz has a nice problem and a nasty one. The nice one: it is the most famous ketchup on earth. The nasty one: ketchup is a commodity, private label is cheaper and perfectly fine, and nobody stands in front of the fries agonising over the brand of the red stuff. People choose their fries with care and take whatever ketchup arrives.
Then somebody at Rethink noticed the thing that had been sitting in plain view for about seventy years. The trapezoidal fry box, the standard fast-food carton used all over the world, is the same silhouette as the Heinz keystone. The shape people already associate with fries is, geometrically, the Heinz logo. Heinz did not need a new brand asset. It needed to point at one it already had, distributed free by every restaurant on the planet.
Photograph the fry boxes. Line them up. Say nothing except: look familiar?
No ketchup in the shot. No bottle, no product, no red. Just other people's packaging, arranged on a page, and a two-word headline that makes you do the last step yourself. The moment you see it you cannot unsee it, and that is the entire mechanism.
It ran from September 2025 across 33 markets, from Canada and the US to the UK, Brazil, Mexico, the UAE and China, mostly as outdoor at transit hubs and in city centres, timed to hit people near the moment they were about to buy fries. There was a long-form film taking you through fry boxes in New York, Milan and Tokyo, plus social and influencer work.
Then the commerce bit, which is the part that turns a nice observation into a sales mechanic: an Uber Eats integration that surfaced Heinz at the exact instant a customer added fries to their order. Poster plants the thought outside, app closes it in the basket.
The stupid: run a global campaign for a ketchup brand and do not show the ketchup. Do not show the bottle, the label, the pour, or the colour red. Spend the money photographing your competitors' and customers' packaging instead, and make the poster a shape-matching puzzle that the audience has to solve unaided, in three seconds, from a moving train.
The smart: the absence only works because of 150 years of presence. Rethink is spending a brand asset most companies do not have, and the discipline is in trusting it completely rather than hedging with a small bottle in the corner. It also does something strategically ruthless: it annexes territory Heinz does not own. Every fry box in the world quietly becomes Heinz media, at zero cost, permanently. And the Uber Eats hook means the campaign is not just a brand flex, it has a conversion point wired into the moment of decision. That is what separates it from a clever poster.
The steal: the best distinctive asset you own may already be out in the world in someone else's hands. Before you commission a new one, audit the shapes, colours and rituals already surrounding your product and ask which of them you could credibly claim. Heinz did not build the connection between fries and its logo. It just noticed and said so first.
The other reason we like it: this is a Print Grand Prix in 2026, from a Toronto agency, for a poster with no product in it. The jury president's line was that what got rewarded was not the absence of the product but the presence of the brand. That is a useful test to carry into any layout. If you removed the product entirely, would anyone still know whose ad this is? Almost always the honest answer is no, and that is the actual brief.
Also: Canadian household penetration up 3.38 points to 10.31%, with $18.5m gross sales value in 2025; Mexico volume share up 3.58%; 42% reach in the UAE; over 150 trade and lifestyle mentions. Straight talk: these are the entry figures from Heinz and Rethink. The share and penetration numbers are the sturdy ones because they come from retail measurement; the +222% Uber Eats figure is a platform-specific lift off an unstated base, so it is the most flattering number in the set.
Client: Heinz (The Kraft Heinz Company)
Agency: Rethink, Toronto
Chief creative officers: Aaron Starkman, Mike Dubrick
Executive creative director: Xavier Blais
Group creative directors: Zachary Bautista, Geoff Baillie
Creative directors: Jacquelyn Parent, Luiz Faria, Karine Doucet
Art directors: Luiz Faria, Amber Arezes, Loretta Lau
Copywriters: Jacquelyn Parent, Julie Day-Lebel
Contagious, Cannes Lions 2026 Print & Publishing winners
Famous Campaigns, case study and results
Kraft Heinz, campaign launch release, September 2025
Creative Review, the hidden link between ketchup and fries
Ads of the World, the work and credits
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: