Heinz is on the lookout (sea* what we did there) for a man who survived for a month at sea on ketchup, so that they can gift him a free boat.
The man, Elvis Francois, became adrift on his boat after it floated away whilst he was performing maintenance on it in December 2022. Francois, 42, who lives on the small island of St. Maarten, was unable to navigate back to shore, as the boat got caught in a sudden outburst of bad weather.
“I tried to [go] back to port, but I lost track because it took me a while to mount the sail and fix the sail,” he said. “…I call my friends, my coworkers. They tried to contact me, but they lost service. There was nothing else I could do than sit down and wait.”
After realising the predicament he was in, Francois wrote help on the back of his boat. He waited 24 days to be rescued, when the Colombian navy found his small vessel. Recounting how he survived, Francois said:
“I have no food. It’s just a bottle of ketchup that was on the boat. Garlic powder, and Maggi, so I mixed it up with some water.”
Francois also used cotton to collect water when it rained.
Now Heinz has made pleas over social media for people, with a clever marketing campaign to find the sailor. The global corporation told CBS news that they want to gift Francois a state-of-the-art boat, which will be will be “equipped with full navigational technology to avoid another disaster in the future.”
