Over the last 2 years Australia has spent almost a full year observing the strictest lockdown rules in the world. As one of Australia’s most loved food brands, we identified that this could be an opportunity to help our customers who were unable to leave the house to go shopping. Adding to this was also severe supply issues with the usual abundance of food being reduced.

We know that our audience has a very small repertoire of go-to meals to cook so supply issues of items like tomato pasta sauce were having a disproportionate impact.

We needed a clever way to help families solve these external issues while inspiring them at a time when everybody needed it the most.

Dinner Hack Hotline was a real-time recipe engine powered by real chefs. Simple enter the items you have in your fridge and pantry and our chefs sent back a delicious, quick and easy recipe using those very same ingredients

Analysing data, we highlighted 4-7pm as the time most families search for cooking inspiration. We interrupted this search with targeted advertising (Paid search and Social) that alerted them to the Dinner Hack Hotline.

Using Messenger, Australians entered their pantry items and our team of chefs would send them back recipes in minutes complete with cook along videos

The strategy was about hyper targeting both in terms of the when we reached people and where we found them.

Our data has shown that the majority of Australians plan what to cook at the very last minute with over 70% of people starting the meal planning journey at 4pm in the afternoon before cooking.

With people only having what they had in their cupboards to cook with (due to lockdowns) we knew that supplies and inspiration were in short supply.

With this constraint, we knew that we needed an idea that was a piece of utility to take the stress out of meal planning in an already stressful time.

All our comms were directed to our higher brand purpose of MAKE DINNER TIME MATTER.

After targeting our consumers, we used real time chefs and recipe creators to make magic out of whatever existed in their pantry.

Consumers would interact via messenger, facebook live and TikTok. They would enter the contents of their pantry and in minutes, our chefs would send them back a live video with cook along instructions. 10 minutes later, the recipes would be available on our social channels to inspire other people to Make Dinner Time Matter.

The Dinner Hack Hotline ran from 4-7pm every day during a two month period of lockdown with over 1800 individual recipes created.

In a period of slow growth in the grocery sector, Masterfoods maintained a strong month on month growth of 8% across its entire portfolio ranging from Herbs/Spices to sauces and recipe kits. It has by far been our most successful campaign to date and it has been rolled out across more markets in the Mars Food network.

As the largest food brand in Australia, we have lead the renaissance of cooking in Australia with a 37.1% increase in people reporting having cooked at home on more than 2 occasions.