Heinz is back with another inventive outdoor campaign. This time, the brand is turning mayonnaise into a breakfast essential. The idea is to embed the product directly into commuters’ daily routines.
The campaign centres around the message: ‘Breakfast sandwiches taste better with Heinz mayonnaise.’ Then Heinz plays with the Chinese word for sandwich, 三明治 (sanmingzhi), breaking it down into the ‘mingzhi formula.’ First: crispy toasted bread. Then layers of meat, egg, and vegetables. Finally, Heinz mayonnaise.
The idea appears throughout a campaign film on the mingzhi formula, positioning mayonnaise as the final touch on a good breakfast. Offline, Heinz rolled the idea out across multiple Chinese cities through installations.
In Chengdu, the brand transformed Meituan power banks into sandwich-shaped charging stations. There’s a clever reframe here, one that paints phone charging as a kind of breakfast energy refill. In Beijing, subway hand straps became mayonnaise-themed, right where the brand can meet busy commuters likely to have breakfast on the mind.
The campaign became even more theatrical in Tianjin’s Yingkoudao subway station with a giant sandwich installation that protruded from the station wall. On nearby steps, layered ingredient graphics gradually assembled into a complete sandwich as commuters climbed.
The Dao view: Heinz are getting very good at outdoor advertising
This isn’t the first time Heinz has experimented with highly interactive outdoor advertising in China. Previous ketchup campaigns included a much-praised subway as timed with China’s 2025 National Games, and elevator ads where ketchup samples doubled as wedding sweets.
Compared with ketchup, which already has strong consumer familiarity in China, mayonnaise remains relatively niche. Heinz’s strategy is to normalise it. Through highly familiar breakfast occasions and commuter touchpoints, they’re basically linking the product to routines. Here, it doesn’t have to sit as a western-type condiment, but as an important part of daily life.
