We set out to reframe what Americans think of as tasty food, by demonstrating that nutritious food can taste delicious thanks to the flavor superpower of Knorr bouillon.

Our objectives were to:

* Grow our dollar sales by 10%, which was ambitious given the category grew 8.8% the prior year.

* Drive traffic to our website featuring nutritious and delicious recipes from Knorr, exceeding our the number of site users from the same period in the prior year, 2022: 1,178,487 new website users and 1,196,984 overall users

* And to break through in pop culture with as many impressions as possible. Based on our PR partners assessment of partnerships used, outlets we’d show up in, and our spend, our target was 1.25B earned impressions.

We introduced America to Knorr’s It’s not Fast Food but it’s so Good campaign, which created recipes of nutritious ingredients made just as crave-worthy as fast food thanks to Knorr bouillon.

This campaign showed nutritious ingredients cooked with Knorr bouillon using over-the-top and mouth-watering tropes that fast food uses to convey taste. We used nostalgic design, hype building music, exaggerated food imagery, dramatic cooking shots, and even deep voice overs.

We teamed up with a former fast food sponsor and long-time Knorr fan and user: Cardi B. We worked with her to create her own Taste Combo and made a meal-kit available on GrubHub, a hot destination for fast-food. A wealth of social content from Cardi’s combo kicked off a crew of other influencers participating in the “Combo Challenge,” a social challenge prompting people to create their own Knorr Taste Combo recipe for the same price as their fast-food combos.

We set out to dig deeper into a specific mindset shared amongst our current audience: the primary cooks in American households. This meant talking to women who are between 25 and 64 and consider themselves their family’s home chef. We defined the “Taste Makers” as those who have an ambition to make tasty, better-for-you meals their family will love.

Bringing nourishment and enjoyment to everyone at the table through food is important to them. While 63% of US adults say taste is the most important factor when deciding what to eat, Taste Makers struggle to get healthy ingredients to provide the exciting, delicious flavor they want to serve their family. So when they are craving a delicious meal, they will often compromise on nutrition to get it. We needed them to see that cooking a nutritious meal at home with Knorr can be crave-worthy too!

We transformed the food Americans should be eating into the food they want to eat by stealing fast food tropes and using them to build our campaign. The first trope was borrowing a celebrity to promote our cause, like fast food usually does. Next, we created our own combo meal (nutritious, of course) and utilized delivery apps, the preferred medium of fast food, to distribute our combos. We launched a social media challenge inspired by fast food trends, which got people excited to create their own nutritious combos. We didn't stop there, we created bold TV spots mimicking the fast food style: Slo-mo shots, close-ups of delicious food, high-energy music, and that iconic fast food-style voiceover. Additionally, we designed eye-catching billboards that stole the bold typography and bright colors synonymous with fast food advertising. And to top it all off, we opened our own nutritious fast food pop-up restaurant.

Our social activation and partnership with Cardi B in June 2023 helped our message get 2.6 billion impressions, and challenged people to try to outdo fast food on flavor in their own kitchens, resulting in $20M worth of earned media.

From April through October 2023 we also saw our website visits rise +70% year- over-year, showing that people were interested in our nutritious yet delicious recipes and seeing what they could cook up with Knorr.

And finally, for January through September 2023, we saw our broth/bouillon dollar sales increase 19% versus a year ago, which was 4x higher than the rate the category was growing (4.1%).