Coronation Celebrations: Heinz ‘Kingchup,’ Chocolate Busts, and Branded Carriages

Brendan Menapace

This Saturday marks the coronation of King Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as King and Queen of the United Kingdom. The excitement isn’t only contained to Britain, obviously, and excitement over this royal event is really heating up.

In this modern world we live in, pretty much every event surrounding the Royal Family comes with some sort of promotional merchandise, where people from all over the world can buy products to celebrate, whether it’s a wedding, baby, tell-all documentary, or coronation. Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, U.K. merchandisers were churning out tons of things with the late queen’s face on it (and selling them for small pieces of paper with her face on them).

At that time, the sentiment was that people were more into Queen Elizabeth merchandise than King Charles merchandise. But now, leading up to the coronation, there are all sorts of Charles-themed products are popping up – some edible, some experiential, and some printed.

Let’s start with the edible ones, shall we? That seems to have caught your eye.

Heinz is introducing a specially labeled ketchup called “Tomato Kingchup,” complete with a little crown on the label, and will sell it online for £2.50 this week.

If that wasn’t enough, Heinz is also selling a full branded bundle for the Coronation for £22.50. The bundle includes a bottle of Kingchup, a tea towel with the label logo on it, a coronation-themed mug, and two coasters.

Each bottle of ketchup is numbered, and Heinz said that No. 1 was sent to Charles himself.

While not branded, there’s also a life-sized bust of Charles made from chocolate. Specifically, it’s made from miniature Snickers, Mars, Twix, Milky Way, Galaxy, and Bounty chocolate bars, and depicts the king in the uniform he’s expected to wear on Saturday.

The BBC reported that the sculpture weighs more than 50 lbs.

“The team studied hours of footage of the King to capture his true likeness, and the resemblance is uncanny,” Emily Owen, senior brand manager for Mars Wrigley’s, told the BBC.

Now, for the stuff you can’t eat.

According to The Guardian, U.K. housewares company Argos is also selling a cardboard cutout of Charles himself for £36.99. It’s sort of creepy, and will likely become even creepier after Saturday, when there’s just a life-sized King Charles standing in the room or storage facility. But, for the day of the event, it’s pretty fun.

It’s not quite as fun as a carriage ride, though. Uber is offering a “Coronation Carriage” ride option in London’s Dulwich Park, where people can ride around in a carriage inspired by previous royal carriages, pulled by four white horses dressed in appropriate coronation attire themselves.

There no doubt will be even more on the streets of London this week, as people flock to the city to witness the event.

Is it all a little over the top? Sure. This whole thing is, from an American standpoint especially, largely pointless. The royal family is all about the pomp and the pageantry. So, the promotional items should follow suit, right?

This does not mean that you need to enlist chocolatiers to create photo-realistic busts for every promotional campaign you do, but it shows how you can take a moment in time or an aspect of a brand’s story and capture it through promotional products.

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