Who: Public and Good Food for Good, a two-year-old “ketchup-style sauce.”

What: A new awareness campaign promoting Good Food for Good, which uses dates as a sweetener but can’t legally call itself ketchup because Canadian food labelling laws don’t recognize dates as one of the product’s official sweetening agents.

Wait, ketchup made from dates? Not made from dates, sweetened with dates. It tastes like ketchup, but without all the sugar. “The taste is what makes it unique,” says Richa Gupta, a former associate marketing manager with General Mills Canada who started Good Food For Good in 2013. Sugar makes up between 20% and 30% of commercial ketchups.

“You could make a healthy product that you remove [the additives] but it tastes like crap,” says Gupta. “It was important for us to make products that taste good, because if you don’t like the taste it’s not going to become part of your everyday diet. You’ll try it and then go back to things that taste the way they should taste.”

When & where: Timed to coincide with prime ketchup-consumption season, the social media campaign debuted July 8 and is running through August on social channels.

Why: It is the first major awareness campaign for the Good Food for Good brand, which has primarily relied on word of mouth and trade shows since debuting on shelves in 2017.

The brand has three primary customer segments, says Gupta: health enthusiasts; people who are following diets such as keto and Paleo and are looking to eliminate carbohydrates (which are abundant in commercial ketchups); and families who are making small changes to their diet in order to eat healthier (our family has been eating it for more than three months).

Taste is particularly important for the latter segment, Gupta says, because if the children don’t like the taste of a product they simply won’t eat it. “It’s the next generation that needs to start eating healthy now so they’ll have good habits,” she says.

Good Food for Good is currently listed in 1,500 grocery stores across Canada, and also launched into California earlier this year. Gupta expects the brand, which also includes a barbecue sauce and a line of cooking sauces, to reach $500,000 in sales this year. Following the “one for one” model adopted by brands like TOMS, Gupta donates a portion of every sale to food banks. The company donated approximately 3% of its revenue last year.

How: The campaign’s centrepiece is a one-minute video featuring Gupta conducting blind taste tests of the Good Food for Good ketchup product with consumers. Whenever tasters say the word “ketchup,” it is bleeped, a humorous way of depicting that the brand has the taste profile of ketchup, but is complying with Canadian food laws.

Accompanying images show ketchup-friendly foods like French fries and hot dogs, with sugary treats like jelly beans and liquorice sticks representing the ketchup that typically accompanies them, accompanied by the message “What are you putting on your food?” All of the campaign elements drive to the GoodFoodForGood.ca website.

And we quote: “We wanted to make people aware of how much sugar goes into a product that you wouldn’t think had sugar,” says Gupta. “We can’t even call a product that’s actually better for you by its name, so we wanted to execute that idea in a way that’s intriguing to the consumer.”—Richa Gupta, founder and president of Good Food for Good