Seeing Around Corners: How Kraft Heinz Uses AI to Decode Culture

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Welcome back to FireStarters, we’re thinking about how products make it to the shelves. Long before anything is made or shipped or planned, and long before sales directors negotiate for shelf space, someone has an idea for a product.

Many products die on the shelf, even more die in the boardroom.

So instead of waiting for one-in-a-million ideas that actually gain traction, how do top brands build a reliable “innovation pipeline?”

For Kraft Heinz, it starts with cultural intelligence. But it their journey wasn’t always straightforward. Let’s break it down.

How Kraft Heinz met us

A few years ago, the food and beverage giant set out to reinvent how it understands and responds to culture. The brand knew that traditional social listening only explained what had already happened—leaving teams reacting to trends instead of shaping them.

What they needed was a way to spot the “unknown unknowns”: the early, often invisible cultural signals that shape future consumer desires. Kraft Heinz wanted to move beyond hindsight and unlock a clearer view of the forces driving taste, behavior, and category momentum long before they hit the mainstream.

Enter Nichefire.

Nichefire worked hand-in-hand with Kraft Heinz to build a multi-layered listening framework. The system continuously identifies emerging cultural signals through always-on AI discovery and custom dashboards designed for key categories such as dips, dressings, condiments, and functional foods.

Specialized analyses were developed around strategic themes, like GLP-1 and metabolic health, providing foresight for R&D and communications planning. To streamline collaboration, Kraft Heinz teams gained unlimited access to tailored reports and dashboards.

They even co-developed new UI features, like the “Moments Matrix,” below to better interpret fast- and slow-moving cultural shifts.

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Kraft Heinz’s results

With Nichefire’s always-on cultural listening, Kraft Heinz:

• Identified early-emerging trends (e.g., functional ketchup, adaptogenic ingredients, shifting dipping behaviors) before they hit the mainstream.

• Automated, category-specific reports now deliver insights directly to stakeholder inboxes, enabling trend discovery across departments.

• Provided real-time cultural guidance, from Super Bowl food trends to consumer reactions to potential additive bans.

• Informed innovation pipelines (e.g., sugar reduction, natural dye alternatives) and supported strategic communications planning.

Check out the full case study →

If you’re reading this, you’re too late

Okay, maybe a slight overstatement - but if you’re not tapping into cultural intelligence today, a Nichefire login won’t help you launch a new product next month.

But next year is totally in the cards. That’s what Nichefire’s holiday guide is for, to help you get ahead of the consumer shifts for 2026 holidays. We gave it away for free at Observe Summit - and you can have it here too.

It’s over 50 pages to fuel your next innovation. Get it here →

What’s been going on at Nichefire

From taking notes in the back rows years ago to standing on stage as a headline sponsor, 

Observe Summit 2025 was more than a milestone, it was a full-circle moment for Nichefire.

If you don’t know about Observe Summit… it’s a leading gathering for social-intelligence professionals, an event created and run by The Social Intelligence Lab, the global community founded by Dr. Jillian Ney to radically rethink how we understand people in a digital world.

After seeing organisations stuck in a cycle of monitoring rather than interpreting, dashboards without direction and insights without impact, Jillian launched the SI Lab to build a new kind of discipline grounded in cultural decoding, behavioural insight, and digital anthropology. What began as a passion project has grown into a community of over 15,000 professionals, and Observe Summit is one of the ways the SI Lab brings this mission to life: a space for experts to come together, challenge convention, and push the field forward.

We’re grateful to everyone who joined us in LA, asked the tough questions, and helped push the conversation forward about how cultural intelligence is reshaping business strategy.

This year’s Observe Summit reminded us that:

➡️ Culture isn’t fluff, it’s predictive infrastructure
➡️ Cultural foresight helps brands see what’s next before it hits their dashboards
➡️ The future doesn’t surprise you when you know where to look

We can't wait for next year.

That’s a wrap on this issue, for more on cultural intelligence, following Khalil El-Amin and Michael Howard on LinkedIn.

We’ll see you next week 👋