Kraft Heinz launches What’s Cooking digital platform
Kraft Heinz is helping home cooks with the launch of a digital platform, What’s Cooking.
Formerly a longstanding print publication, What’s Cooking is relaunching as an online space for chefs and food creators to create and manage their own content, engage and grow their audiences, and collaborate with other creatives—all to better serve and connect more closely with home cooks, according to Kraft Heinz.
The company has first partnered with Edward Lee, a chef, author and Top Chef alum, who joins as creative director for What’s Cooking. The platform will be promoting content exclusively from Lee in the beta phase, while the team actively sources other culinary creators from across North America.
To access content, people have to sign up and join the community. They’ll be able to watch videos, save recipes, learn new techniques, and get to know the different chefs and creators.
“The piece that was so innovative about What’s Cooking in the past was an ability to connect with food lovers,” says Diana Frost, chief growth and sustainability officer at Kraft Heinz Canada. “And so, the essence of the new platform is ‘for food lovers by food creators.’ It’s about connecting a community of [home cooks] and doing it in a way that is exciting, innovative and new.”
She adds that as a result of the pandemic, many people have returned to home cooking and the trend is here to stay. With What’s Cooking, “people can learn, be inspired and engage with home cooking,” says Frost.
The reimagined What’s Cooking platform was developed in Kraft Heinz Canada’s digital lab in Toronto. It’s part of Kraft Heinz Company’s ongoing digital transformation, which includes enabling and driving more enticing, engaging and interactive consumer touchpoints.
“The data and insights that we will get from What’s Cooking will help [inform] how we serve up personalized and relevant content, as well as inform what type of creators we want to partner with next,” says Frost. “We’re putting consumers, a culture of food, and our brands at the centre of our transformation and [What’s Cooking] does such a great job of doing that.”
Frost says specific brands and products from Kraft Heinz will be incorporated in the platform in a subtle way. “You might see our peanut butter, cream cheese or ketchup involved in recipes, but it’s more about getting people to fall in love with food,” says Frost. “It’s all about a community of food lovers and food creatives and if you go too far down the path of branded content, it’s a little bit more inauthentic. For us, it’s more about the data, insights, innovation and connectivity, as opposed to branded content.”
