Seasonal offerings of popular staples are hardly a revolutionary premise, but in recent years, brands have taken this beyond funky packaging and begun to experiment more with the products themselves – with mixed degrees of success.
Enter Heinz Hot Cross Bun Mayonnaise; a seasonal iteration of a popular condiment that precisely nobody was hankering for.
If the pandemic, and the three years of collective trauma it brought about, broke many peoples’ brains, 2023 feels like the year the impact of that distress started to bleed into wider decision making; and Hot Cross Bun Mayonnaise feels like precisely the sort of product dreamt up in an isolation-induced fever
Straight out of the box, first impressions weren’t positive: a brownish sludge peppered with flecks of cinnamon and the odd raisin, the condiment resembled something closer to badly mixed wallpaper paste – and smelt a bit like it too.
To add to this, the serving suggestions provided alongside the product: ‘a delicious topping for your buns, or super tasty straight from the spoon’ only provoked more alarm.
But orders are orders, and I dutifully – if hesitantly – I applied a generous blob to a hot cross bun, before taking a bite.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was hard to tell where the bun ended and the mayo began, but the condiment infused the bread with a faint, somewhat complementary tang that inexplicably improved it, without actually tasting of eggy mayo.
I didn’t stop there, however. Inspired by the popular (though itself controversial) trend of fries in milkshake, I smeared the sticky substance on several large chips to see if the combination of sweet and savory – and the invocation of fries and mayo – produced a winning dish.
Sure enough, it worked here too: the mayo contained enough, well, mayonnaise to hit the spot, while the slight hint of sweetness provided by the ‘hot cross bun’ fillings nudged it into that perfect zone of contrasting yet harmonious flavours.
On some level, it’s more distressing that that this product works. Heinz has somehow dreamt up a seasonal product that delivers on its premise and effectively combines two, completely polar foodstuffs into something you want to go back for.
Perhaps some genius came out of those lockdown-induced fever dreams after all.
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