Heinz Ketchup is calling out restaurants engaged in so-called “ketchup fraud,” but instead of slapping them on the wrist, it plans to offer them a little support.

Created by agency partner Rethink, the series of print ad shows various restaurant workers filling empty Heinz Ketchup bottles with cheaper, generic alternatives. The tagline – “even when it isn’t Heinz, it has to be Heinz” – points to the core of the campaign: that even when restaurants replace their Heinz, they still know that their customers are going to be looking for that iconic bottle.

Megan Lang, marketing director at Heinz North America, says the campaign was inspired by a video on Snapchat that showed an actual restaurant refilling Heinz bottles with another brand’s ketchup. Subsequent social listening exercises helped unveil that many other users had seen restaurants doing the same thing, pointing to a widespread behaviour.

“We thought, what better way to express our core brand belief that ’It Has to Be Heinz’ than to simply amplify an existing consumer behavior in a supportive and funny way?” Lang said.

As part of the campaign, Heinz is encouraging customers to tag restaurants on social they suspect of committing “ketchup fraud.” But, rather than shame them, the brand plans to do outreach to the most-tagged restaurants and work towards a sustainable way to keep Heinz on their tables, part of its efforts to support independent restaurants.

The ads will be running on billboards in New York and Chicago, in U.S. print titles, as well as on social and through PR. Starcom handled the U.S. buy, with Zeno on Canadian PR.