Picture this: a table at one of Craft & Crew's west metro Twin Cities locations. A couple settles in for dinner. The server brings drinks. And sitting right there, in the center of the table, at eye level, for the next hour and a half, is a bottle of 78 Brand ketchup wearing a co-branded condiment label. The Craft & Crew name. The logo. A QR code that opens their online store, captures an email address, and promotes every restaurant in the group.
Two brands, one table, decades of shared values
Nobody ignores a condiment bottle when they're hungry and waiting for food. They pick it up. They read it. They scan it. That's the insight at the heart of one of the most quietly effective co-branded label programs in independent CPG, a partnership between 78 Brand and Craft & Crew Hospitality that's been running for over six years and launched its latest chapter in June 2026. It was developed and executed through Golden Scope Partners, as one of many co-brand partnerships built for brands looking to win where the big guys won't play.
78 Brand wasn't built in a boardroom. Founders Patrick Pilewski and Bernard Utrata started it the same way most great food brands start: with a product they believed in and a willingness to do the work nobody else wanted to do. They loaded ketchup into the trunk of a car and drove it to restaurants in the Chicago area. Their ketchup contained 78 percent tomatoes, one of the most tomato-rich formulas available anywhere, with no high fructose corn syrup, non-GMO, gluten-free, and priced to be accessible. The original 78 Red debuted at the National Restaurant Association show in May 2013 and found an audience immediately.
Craft & Crew's roots go back even further. Steve Benowitz bought a working-class tavern in Hastings, Minnesota in 1976, the place now known as The Bar Draft House. His son David joined the business nearly two decades later and began rebuilding it from the inside out. Today Craft & Crew runs eight locations across the Twin Cities west metro, each one a neighborhood place, not a destination. Roughly 60 percent of their customers are regulars who visit two or three times a week. That's not foot traffic. That's community.
What a co-branded label actually does
The mechanics are straightforward. 78 Brand produces custom co-branded labels for Craft & Crew's condiment bottles, ketchup and mustard, with the Craft & Crew identity alongside the 78 Brand mark. In exchange, Craft & Crew receives a rebate on cases. The economics work for the restaurant group. The distribution works for the brand.
But the label itself does something most restaurant marketing can't. The condiment bottle is the one piece of branded real estate in a restaurant that no one takes away. The menu leaves. The server comes and goes. But the bottle stays. And when someone is waiting for food, they pick it up.
The QR code on the 78 Brand and Craft & Crew label does three things: it routes guests directly to the Craft & Crew online store, it captures email addresses for the restaurant group's marketing list, and it surfaces all eight Craft & Crew locations. One scan, mid-meal, from a person who is already a fan, turns a condiment bottle into a guest acquisition and retention tool. Research from Uniqode's 2025 State of QR Codes report found that 95 percent of companies using QR codes said the technology helped them gather first-party data.
People sit down for over an hour and look at that bottle. It's the best ad space around.David Benowitz, Craft & Crew Hospitality
The math on a bottle of ketchup
Here's something media buyers and brand managers tend to miss: the condiment table in a busy restaurant is arguably the highest-attention, lowest-cost advertising surface in food. A 30-second pre-roll costs a viewer nothing to skip. A social post disappears in a feed. A banner ad gets scrolled past. But a person sitting at a table, waiting for their food, with a bottle in front of them? That's a captive audience in a good mood, in a space they chose to be in, holding your product.
The rebate program makes the economics work across every case Craft & Crew orders. It's structured so that the hospitality group is rewarded for volume while 78 Brand gains consistent, embedded placement across eight locations and every private event, catering order, and carry-out meal the group handles. Over six years, that's not a marketing campaign. That's infrastructure.
A partnership built to last, and to grow
The June 2026 launch marks a new chapter for both brands. 78 Brand is expanding its presence in the hospitality channel with a renewed co-brand program, and the Craft & Crew relationship is the proof of concept that makes the case to other restaurant groups. What makes it replicable is precisely what makes it work here: both parties bring something real to the table.
78 Brand brings a product with genuine quality credentials, clean ingredients, real flavor, a story that holds up to scrutiny. Craft & Crew brings consistent volume, loyal regulars, and a brand identity that guests actually connect with. The co-branded label isn't a sticker slapped on a generic product. It's a genuine expression of two brands that share a belief that hospitality, done right, is about craft.
The bottle on the table has always been there. Most brands treat it like a commodity. 78 Brand and Craft & Crew decided to treat it like what it actually is: premium, high-attention ad space that goes to every table, in every location, for every meal. Six-plus years in, the results speak for themselves. Emails captured. Stores promoted. Regulars turned into online customers. Cases moving at volume. Two independent brands, one rooted in Chicago, one rooted in the Twin Cities, finding that shared values have a way of producing shared wins.