McCormick, a 130-year-old brand, who stands for the future of flavor, had some spicy global news to share in 2022.

For the very first time in its 23 years of Flavor Forecasts, McCormick debuted its first-ever Flavor of the Year to the world, Vietnamese x Cajun. For this epic event, we needed to launch in a transformative way that demonstrated that this flavor icon is all about innovating to meet our consumers where they are and transcend definitions of flavor, beyond taste.

With these very big goals and a limited budget, we harnessed the passion around the hottest food culture debate and unlocked the enthusiasm of the metaverse community to build brand affinity, expand customer reach, and achieve record-high commercial success through a never-seen-before flavorful experience anchored in the carbon-friendly virtual world.

McCormick’s House of Flavor delivered an experience so audaciously wrong yet so outrageously fun to make one simple point: Right? Wrong? It doesn’t matter how you feel about flavor experimentation, you’re going to love this experience. So just go with the flow!

The House of Flavor was brought to life the McCormick way: innovative yet sustainable. Going beyond the conventional flavor-tasting approach in the physical space, we built a whole new McCormick universe in the metaverse – inspired by the spices of McCormick’s Flavor of the Year, Vietnamese x Cajun.

In this virtual destination that showed that the world of flavor has no limits, our visitors were given a taste of McCormick’s flavorful history, challenged to win exclusive avatar wearables, and given the chance to purchase the new flavor in real life through a click-to-buy link – all to grow more love and sales for the 130-year-old brand!

“It’s so wrong, it’s right” was born from the age-long cultural debate on flavor fusion. From swalty to taco waffle, food enthusiasts have mixed feelings about mixing unthinkable flavors. Flavor innovators love it. Flavor purists hate it.

Launching Vietnamese x Cajun as 2022’s Flavor of the Year gave McCormick permission to address this debate, taking “what’s wrong” to a “meta level” to shine this truth on all: Right or wrong, when you are loving it, that’s all that matters!

The launch was strategized to amplify this truth and prove there’s no limit to how you experience the future world of flavor–starting with the experienced pioneers in the metaverse who already embrace a virtual world, without limits.

The House of Flavor was an intentional fusion of sensorial and commerce experimentation implemented on Decentraland, a 3D browser-based platform celebrated for its unique social virtual world, NFT marketplace, and open-source platform. It was built on the Polygon Layer 2 chain, which is virtually carbon-free and well-aligned with McCormick’s sustainability standards.

Fusing AI, spatial audio, 3D visuals, and UX logic, we created a flavorful world that defied the rules of virtual experimentation to allow visitors to almost virtually taste it, then teased and promoted this not-to-miss experience through social media posts, website landing pages, and online ads.

We engaged visitors with interactive virtual games and activities through a unique journey to purchase from Web 3 to Web 2, driving deeper conversion on McCormick.com to track incremental revenue. The play-to-win NFTs further enabled us to activate visitors for future Flavor of the Year activations.

The House of Flavor turned out to be McCormick’s most successful Flavor Forecast launch in 23 years!

By harnessing the power of culture and engaging in the most authentic manner on the most cutting-edge platform, McCormick won over the hearts, minds, and wallets of untapped spice seekers.

The House of Flavor began trending on the Decentraland event board in less than three hours of launch, with over 1,000 NFTs claimed within 48 hours.

In just three days, McCormick saw a +525% sales increase, compared to the last three years of launches, and 71.5% of the purchases made were by new customers!

Overall, more than 357 million impressions were garnered, with 600k organic visits. But more importantly, visitors were so engaged, they spent an average of 25 minutes on site. This is 25x more than the average time spent on McCormick.com!