In 2023, General Mills fruit snack brands were the undisputed category leader at more than 50% share, but challenging economic forces weren’t in our favor. When we saw a TikTok that showed a scoop of mango sorbet getting added to the middle of a Fruit Roll-Up and instantly freezing to create a crunchy fruit-wrapped ice cream burrito, we knew this was our moment to get the Internet excited about trying Fruit Roll-Ups in a new way.

When we discovered that this incredible creation was picking up steam, we didn’t yet have a presence on TikTok. But that was OK! We had a solid strategic base for our holistic presence on social that was easily adaptable to TikTok.

The brief? Use our malleable fruit snack product as a permission slip for creative play among our community. Then amplify this play beyond our community to drive brand engagement and, ultimately, sales.

Our idea was to capitalize on this trend by playing back with the Internet to encourage even more creative uses of Fruit Roll-Ups. This meant focusing on engagement-driving tactics on TikTok, such as Stiches, Duets, and Video Reply-to-Comments, as well as using fan creativity as inspiration for our owned TikTok content.

This also meant flooding the comments to reward fans who had created content around this trend. Our groundswell of proactive moderation ensured that we had an engaged TikTok following right out of the gate.

We began by listening and learning from our community in real-time. How were people talking about Fruit Roll-Ups and ice cream on TikTok? What words were they using to describe it? What types of content were they creating to show it off?

We knew our teen-focused audience was already culinary curious, as previous high-performing content series' asked hypothetical questions to gauge new ways to eat our product. So our entirely fan-led approach, which gave us opportunity to “play” and engage in conversation with the Fruit Roll-Ups audience in real-time, was already rooted in audience truths. We rolled this our via in-platform TikTok features, such as Duets and Reply-to-Comments.

Knowing we were responding to an existing trend and conversation meant we had to focus on joining in ways that were both native to TikTok and aligned with what the community was already talking about.

Our fans inspired our first brand video, which was a Stitch of a popular influencer’s TikTok video, which amassed 6 million views overnight. And the community ate it up.

We continued our focus on play with even more TikTok Duets and Reply-to-Comment videos each day. But we’re still a brand. And brands have to ensure safety, too. We put guard rails around play, stemming from a creator who tried to convince the world that the plastic that wraps our product disappeared when frozen. Do not eat the plastic, people! This subtle correction Stitch of that creator video struck virality again with 18 million views.

All of this unfolded over one month, including weekends. Our approach of listening to the fans and “playing back” with the Internet was working. And this playfulness hasn’t stopped, as our “Ways to eat Fruit Roll-Ups” social series is now on part 31!

All that viral buzz drove a fury of media attention. Jimmy Fallon joked about it on the Tonight Show. Drew Barrymore talked up the trend. Scarlett Johansson took part in the challenge on the Today Show.

Listening and responding to the community worked. Creating quick-turn content, seeding play on the Internet, and driving new product usage occasions worked even better.

We earned over 1 billion social and earned impressions, saw 34 million views on owned content, and received 2.3 million engagements on TikTok. Google’s Year in Review placed us as #5 among Internet trends.

And all that conversation sold enough product to scale Mount Everest 28 times and drove a sales increase at one national retailer by 30%.