For 30 years, Lunchables pioneered convenient, compartmented lunch food that kids love. But by 2021, flat sales, a product that didn’t meet some parents’ health expectations and a stale, long-running campaign combined to undercut its relevance.

The client’s ask: help us reinvent this brand and give the business a dynamic path forward with today’s kids and parents.

To unlock a solution, we partnered with Lunchables for a six-week strategy sprint (what we call a Brand Camp). It starts with rigorous research (stakeholder interviews, custom research, expert interviews and a cultural study) and culminates in a collaborative workshop. In it, we synthesized all the learning, crystalized the problem, defined the audience mindset, identified the brand “magic” and explored strategic territories—and landed a North Star organizing idea. This idea would be a creative strategy platform that transcends any single campaign and can last for many years, across current and future Lunchables products.

The “Power Kid Creativity” strategy has inspired four years of work for Lunchables, including two new product launches.

For classic Lunchables, we centered on creative building, turning our product into an edible toy. We invented the word “Lunchabuild,” inspiring kids to build anything out of Lunchables through contextual OOH. You could unlock Lunchabuild blueprints and order Lunchabuilds directly from our site. We turned cartoon characters into builds (like SpongeBob SquarePants), let kids build with Lunchables in Roblox and even launched the Lunchabuild Adventure, giving kids a Lunchables version of an escape room.

“Power Kid Creativity” even guided how we launched new product innovations. With Dunkables, we showed how A.I. is no match for K.I. (kid imagination), using actual kids’ ideas for our campaign. With Grilled Cheesies, we showed what happens inside a microwave (according to kids). We’re even hiring a real kid as the brand’s “chief imagination officer.”

During our Brand Camp, we put ourselves in kids’ shoes and really made them our partners, gut-checking with parents along the way (we’ve since installed a permanent “Kids Council” of kid advisors).

Research revealed that kids who eat Lunchables embrace creative play and imagination more than other kids—LEGO, Minecraft, arts and crafts. They find joy in the act of creating, regardless of the outcome. It’s empowering, a source of confidence and something their parents deeply value.

We observed how kids interact with Lunchables, watching them stack and arrange the pieces before eating them. And we saw a clear superpower waiting to be unleashed: buildability. We realized that Lunchables are more than fuel for the body; they’re creative fuel for the mind.

Our creative strategy “Power Kid Creativity,” and we set out to give Lunchables an active, emotional role as a creative toy that they could imagine, build—then eat!

The “Power Kid Creativity” strategy reignited the Lunchables business for both the classic products and the new product innovations while reconnecting kids and parents with the brand.

Over the course of the campaigns, Lunchables portfolio sales have climbed to over $5 billion—almost 21% in top-line growth in the past four years. “Lunchabuild This” spiked back-to-school dollar sales by 38% and unit sales by 20.9%. Dunkables and Grilled Cheesies have surpassed their trial-and-repeat sales goals, racking up over $4.7 million in gross sales in just a few months. Dunkables outsold the top competitor in the category, with a 40% higher buy rate, while Grilled Cheesies was their biggest launch beyond the refrigerator aisle.

Today over half of all American households with kids under 18 are buying Lunchables. With over 320 million earned impressions for the campaigns, Lunchables achieved 96% awareness, and 66% of parents now say Lunchables “fuels creativity.”