The last two years were supposed to be a period of recovery after the pandemic crisis; instead, as the war between Russia and Ukraine escalated, it turned into the year of the biggest global energy crisis in 50 years.

The crisis affected many major economies, including Europe, and emerging and developing economies.

In fact, on household budgets, rising gas prices have had a significant impact, generating sky-high costs for basic activities such as heating homes and cooking.

In recent years Barilla has been dedicating much effort to studying methods to help people lead more sustainable lives. That's how data appeared on a cooking method used in Italy since the 1800s until the economic boom of the 1960s. An effective and simple method that can save up to 80% of energy, but now totally forgotten.

Upon landing on data on this old cooking method, we called it Passive Cooking, and decided it's the best time for the world to rediscover - the most innovative old method to cook pasta. It's as simple as - bringing water to a boil and cooking pasta with the heat off, reducing gas consumption and CO2 emissions by up to 80%. Currently, there are 440 millions pasta bowls being cooked in the world every day. So helping change the way people are used to cook pasta would not be easy.

Barilla's global audience is mainly composed of households aged between 25 and 55, who consider pasta as a family meal that makes everyone happy. They are constantly looking for solutions to improve their cooking methods and demonstrate their love for the planet.

To reach them, we put our message where everyone could see it: on the pack.

We also supported it with a mix of contents that could intercept them in every aspect of their media diet: social platforms (Meta, YouTube), messaging apps (WhatsApp), Google search and display banners, influencers and chefs, brand website, and PR news.

We wanted to reach as many people as possible with the message of how easy and accessible passive cooking is, and the huge impact it can have on their daily lives and the well-being of the planet.

Passive Cooking was launched globally, showing how easy it is to cook perfect pasta al dente and save up to 80% energy.

Being a campaign based on changing a consumer behavior, the first action was to intervene in the brand media that reaches the most people: our packs.

Every consumer looks at the cooking times before cooking pasta, and right there we included the new Passive Cooking process with the updated times on each pasta type. Barilla added passive cooking timing for pasta al dente also on website and online recipes.

Then, celebrity chefs and global influencers made the method popular and challenged their followers to try it. A WhatsappBOT was created for step by step guides for any Barilla pasta type. We also created the Passive Cooker, a smart device that monitors and alerts, we gave it to restaurants and released also open source.

Barilla turned a forgotten method into the talk of the town with +2000 media articles worldwide and radio, podcast and TV debates.

A larger community of chefs, KOLs and celebrities joined the conversation.

Even tech-savvies from GitHub and Reddit couldn’t help but talk about our open-source device and how to replicate it.

The exposure was massive: over 1,6 billion PR reach across the world.

If all the people use passive cooking ONCE, it would save enough energy to power the city of Rome for 7 years.

We know for sure we nudged enough people to generate a tremendous online demand on how to adopt the method with a +370% increase on Google searches. And for a selected pool of partner restaurants, the device helped cutting off up to 30% of their energy bill costs.