Heinz to give new boat to man who survived on ketchup while lost at sea

theguardian.com:

A US ketchup manufacturer is making arrangements to provide a new boat to a man who ate the company’s signature condiment to survive being lost at sea for nearly a month.

The Heinz food company, based in Pittsburgh, has made contact with the saved sailor, Elvis François, about buying him a new sailing vessel after it launched a social media campaign which was titled #FindtheKetchupBoatGuy that quickly went viral. François had abandoned his old boat when he was finally rescued.

“We received thousands of likes, shares and messages of kindness in our search to find Elvis François,” a statement on Heinz’s Instagram page said on Monday. “It was an incredible group effort across six continents that led to the hundreds of articles and leads and our eventual contact with Elvis.”

Heinz issued a separate statement to the Guardian on Tuesday that said the company and François “are working out the logistical details of [getting] him his new boat” but otherwise didn’t elaborate.

Emo News, a media outlet in Dominica, where François is from, had reported in a brief Facebook post on Sunday that Heinz representatives met with the sailor over a Zoom conference call two days earlier.

The #FindtheKetchupBoatGuy campaign has served as a postscript of sorts to a survival saga that began in December, when currents in the Caribbean swept François’ sailboat away while he made repairs to it off the island of Sint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles, where he lives.

François later told officials that he tried to use his cellphone to tell his friends where he was so they could come find him, but he didn’t have an adequate signal.

He subsisted on a bottle of Heinz ketchup, garlic powder, cubes of the Maggi brand of soup and rainwater which he collected