Heinz Helps Artificial Intelligence Master Cooking with Its First-Ever AI Cookbook

While it’s hard to deny that AI has mastered many things over the last few years – from translating languages to even writing wedding speeches – something that still leaves a lot to be desired are its culinary skills. Monstrous tomatoes, grotesque portions and sauce splattered all over the place are just some of the strange things that appear when given the task of creating a food image.

Today, in partnership with VML Spain, Heinz aims to bridge this gap between food and technology by launching the first recipe book that teaches AI (and humans too) how to cook like a pro.

On the cookbook, Caio Fontenele, Heinz new ventures director, explained, “With over 50% of the general population admitting to using AI in their day to day lives, including for recipe inspiration and cooking instructions, we decided to put AI to the test. A culinary test. And, despite AI being able to speak all languages, write speeches, launch satellites into space, we noticed that actually, when it comes to cooking, even AI needed some help!

Following this insight, our chefs partnered with AI experts to teach AI how to create the perfect recipes using only Heinz tomatoes. Our AI Cookbook is a collection of curated prompts that when given to AI, create delicious food images and recipes that can be followed at home. The secret ingredient to these perfect prompts? Heinz Tomatoes.

The Heinz AI Cookbook is our latest milestone in making our most loved ingredient, Heinz Tomatoes, open to everyone – humans, and AI too”.

Paco Badia, executive creative director at VML Spain, added, “We continually look for ways to showcase the superiority of Heinz Tomatoes, the best tomatoes in the world, as the base of any recipe. And the inability of AI to correctly portray a food image has allowed us to explain it in an original way, from a world seemingly so far away, but very connected to the brand's philosophy of making its main ingredient open to any cook”. 

The Heinz AI Cookbook is a technological project that leverages Heinz’s 150 years of tomato expertise to teach AI how to cook. Heinz chefs, an AI designer and prompt experts came together to develop the ideal prompts AI needed to create over 30 delicious recipes, using an ingredient capable of enhancing any dish, digitally and in real life: Heinz tomatoes.

This innovative project follows the successful launch of the Heinz Culinary Tomatoes campaign last September, Heinz Tomato Open Sauce, where the brand has embraced the open-source tech philosophy by giving people access to their most loved ingredient to elevate every cook’s recipe with the unmistakable taste of Heinz tomatoes. With the new AI Cookbook, Heinz demonstrates that it remains committed to its purpose: to help everyone improve their tomato recipes… even AI.

The e-version of the Heinz A.I. Cookbook will be available to download for free here while physical copies of the book will be delivered to a handful of lucky influencers in the UK. The campaign will exist as a PR activation and social media campaign.