Good Luck to the Baked Bean Baron in Its Mission to Make Heinz Mean Restaurantz

Baked bean and condiment monolith Heinz has hatched a very ambitious plan: getting people to order inferior versions of the foods they like to put Heinz products on, purely because the foods themselves are also “made” by Heinz.

Its new food delivery tie-up with Lean Kitchen Network and Uber Eats promises numerous dark kitchens delivering “Heinz Brekkie,” whose menu features Heinz products insofar as it possibly can: there are baked beans; there is ketchup; there is HP sauce. Everything else is just ... food. A bagel; a breakfast burger; a fry-up. The kinds of foods that people at home and cafes up and down the country make and serve, and already put Heinz condiments on willingly.

Lean Kitchen Network has form: it managed to turn Twisted, a Facebook page, into a sentient food delivery kitchen and studio with the help of some needlessly messy burgers. But translating viral recipe videos hitherto unavailable anywhere into real foods to be ordered for clout sounds quite a lot easier than convincing people to order a middle-of-the-road breakfast bun or a bagel topped with cheesy beans out of nothing more than unbridled loyalty to a widely available supermarket brand.

The company is undeterred, believing that the venture can not just sell buns and beans, but allow it to “test new flavours” and — this might be the real kicker — get even more information about customers’s eating habits. Data harvesting through the medium of baked beans and ketchup? It has to be Heinz.