Enlisting the help of ‘Papa’, a puppet character from Dolmio’s long-running TV ads, we launched a campaign to get Britain’s families growing tomatoes together.

We partnered with The Sun, the UK’s biggest daily newspaper, to give away free tomato seeds. Our print and online content taught families to grow, featured delicious tomato-based recipes, and housed Papa’s competition to find Britain’s best tomato.

We utilised The Sun’s expertise in reader promotions to source and deliver the seeds and build a website to handle applications.

To give the campaign authenticity, we partnered with the Scouts, the international youth organisation, to educate and inspire kids and parents in the wonders of self-grown food.

In a true first, we made seed packs available through local troops, and offered them ‘growing packs’ to contribute towards a Dolmio-branded growing badge, which scouts could wear on their uniforms with pride.

The response was overwhelming and the campaign quickly gained traction with families and scout clubs.

In under a week, we had sent out the 100,000 seed packs we had allocated. Fifty thousand more were ordered and we ran out again in less than a week.

Papasbigtomatochallenge.co.uk has received 137k visits, with an average dwell time of more than three minutes.

People who were exposed to our campaign were 28% more likely to say that “Dolmio uses natural ingredients”, and 44% more likely to associated Dolmio with healthy eating.

And crucially, Dolmio value sales grew by 8.9% year on year.