The meat industry employs 92,000 New Zealanders, generating $12 billion for the economy. Kiwis are among the biggest meat-eaters in the world, each consuming on average 73.7kg of meat per year.

New Zealand’s reliance on meat is a hot topic, with health issues, animal ethics, and sustainability concerns fiercely debated amongst politicians and in public.

Enter HELL Pizza – a 100% New Zealand owned and operated takeaway franchise. The brand is notorious for their hellish personality, but central to their business philosophy is creating a more sustainable future for New Zealand.

HELL source their food locally, use electric delivery vehicles, and proactively seek out greener food options, like plant-based proteins.

In December 2022 HELL messed with a Kiwi classic and introduced a limited-time Steak & Cheese Pie pizza, only it was made without meat. Their objective was to sell out of the new product, champion meat-alternatives, while increasing brand love.

Rather than hiding from the controversy, we met it head on. Since Hell had taken the meat out of a Kiwi classic, we took a vegetarian condiment and made it meaty. ToMEATo Sauce is a tomato sauce made with real blood and served in a blood bag. Each limited edition pizza sold came with a ToMEATo Sauce bag and a dilemma – enjoy the vegetarian pizza, or douse it in blood?

Meat-eating is a major part of New Zealand’s national identity.

Beef and sheep farms cover 32% of New Zealand land area and New Zealanders are some of the largest meat-consumers in the world.

Your chosen diet is an expression of your personal identity.

Because diets reflect an individual’s values and beliefs and signal an affiliation with a larger cultural group, it is very difficult to change perceptions of different food groups.

Plant-based meats are linked to an anti-meat identity.

Promoting plant-based meat alternatives as “CRUELTY FREE”, or “NOTHING NAUGHTY” proliferates a notion that meat-eating is evil.

For meat-eaters, embracing plant-based meat is a betrayal to their identity and tribe.

People reject behaviours and opinions outside of their tribe, seeing them as a threat to their personal identity.

To get meat-eaters to try plant-based meat, we’d need to reassure them that eating it wouldn’t make them any less of a meat-eater.

A Tomato based sauce had to be created with real blood in it with a ‘meaty taste’ so the carnivores would be satisfied. Deer blood was a high-in-iron healthy choice that we could add easily and safely into the sauce mix along with some meat stock.

Once we loaded our blood bags full of our ToMEATo sauce, we let the visual of the bag itself confront people in social media, OOH and radio. Sending it directly to radio show hosts and social influencers allowed the online debate to explode.

When people ordered pizza they were then confronted with the bag and a decision – to sauce it or not.

The 6,000 blood bags became a point of discussion for a much bigger topic – 16 major news outlets and radio stations were discussing the controversial campaign and shining a light, not only on the product, but the Hell Brand itself.

Our meat-less Steak & Cheese Pie Pizza along with 6,000 limited edition blood-bagged sauces sold out in just 3 weeks.

But it was something of a Trojan sauce, as each bag only contained 0.5ml of blood (less than a slice of pepperoni). Despite that, 70% of those who tried it were meat-eaters and 30% said they’d swap meat for plant-based options in future.

Through earned media, we reached 3.2 million New Zealanders, smashing our base target of 1.3 million. And of course, it blew up on social media, generating 2.4 million engagements with campaign content.

This resulted in an earned media ROI of $17 NZD for every dollar spent.