"Buy one ketchup bottle, get porn free" probably wasn't the promotion Heinz's marketing team envisioned.
Heinz, now owned primarily by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, issued an apology Thursday after a customer in Germany discovered the QR code on his bottle of ketchup leads to a porn site, according to UPI.
The QR code on the back of the bottle was part of a labeling design contest intended to take customers to the contest website upon being scanned, reported UPI. Heinz says its ownership of the Internet page expired after the contest wrapped up in 2014, allowing the address to be bought by someone else, according to the report. That's when a pornographic website took it over. (Tweet This)
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Daniel Korell was the first to point out the gaffe, writing that the ketchup "is probably not for minors" alongside a photo on the company's Facebook page.
"Even if the bottle was a leftover, it's still in lots of households," Korell said in his comment, translated by UPI. "It's incomprehensible that you didn't reserve the domain for one or two years. A [German] domain name really doesn't cost the Earth."
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For his troubles, UPI says Heinz offered Korell a custom-designed ketchup bottle free of charge.
Coincidentally, the porn site that bought the website the QR code now points to offered Korell a free membership as well, according to German news outlet, Bild.
—Read more on this story from UPI.