Heinz bottles have previously offered 57 varieties of condiment options and now the company unveils the Heinz Remix at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. This customizable sauce dispenser offers three times more variety and the company plan to roll out the dispenser in restaurants by the end of this year.
“We are very, very clear that away-from-home and food service gives us an opportunity to test, to learn, to understand and to build trends much earlier than we have done historically,” said Peter Hall, Kraft Heinz’s head of its North American food service division.
The business model is still in the works and there is a possibility of using this machine for drive-thru orders but it comes with a challenge. Drive-thru orders need to be executed at a speedy pace but these machines are more time-consuming to operate than the packets.
In order to create a customized sauce, people need to use the touchscreen to select a base of either ketchup, ranch, 57 Sauce or BBQ sauce and then add in enhancers such as jalapeno, smoky chipotle, buffalo and mango. Consumers will also need to set one of three intensity levels.
The machine was built in six months with assistance from Microsoft, engineers and developers. Although people may not need hundreds of options, the technical team brought to life more options than the consumer’s wildest dreams.
“We’ve been on this journey to make innovation the number one growth driver across our business,” said Alan Kleinerman, Vice President of Disruption at Kraft Heinz. “To do that, we knew we needed to operate differently than we had in the past, to think bigger, to be more consumer-centric.”
Many people compared the Remix machine’s design to the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine with the touchscreen drink dispensers. Kleinerman announced that the main source of inspiration for the Remix machine are the consumers and food service operators, rather than other competitors.
“They showed the power of iteration and innovating as they received feedback,” Kleinerman said of Coca-Cola. “I think it’s easy enough to draw the parallels, but this was an opportunity born through the original insights that came through and our desire to really change and build on the experience that consumers have today.”
The data from its sauce dispenser will be useful in launching new products in grocery stores that align with consumer preferences.
For the consumer who likes to look at all of their options before making a decision, good luck! There are over hundreds of options to scroll through and the food might get cold before a decision is made.