Background and Context

Lunchables pioneered convenient, compartmented lunch food that kids love. But flat sales, a product that wasn’t meeting some parents’ health expectations and a stale, long-running campaign combined to undercut its relevance.

Creative Challenge

We needed a new strategic idea and creative platform to reignite the brand with kids and parents in 2022. The challenge: giving families a new way to think about Lunchables when the product itself wasn’t new.

The Solution

Research with kids and parents helped us land a creative strategy on the basis of an untapped product “magic” and a larger kid and parent truth.

We found that kids who eat Lunchables embrace creative play and imagination more than other kids—from building with LEGOs to constructing an epic castle in Minecraft to doing arts and crafts. For them, the joy is in the act of building and creating, regardless of what the outcome is or how great it looks. It’s empowering and a big source of self-esteem and confidence (49% of kids said they feel their best when creating), and creative activities are something that their parents value, encourage and even often like to do with them.

And our product was actually another creative outlet for kids. Lunchables empowers kids to build lunch their own way as they stack and arrange the pieces together. And every child makes them differently. As we watched kids build their food, we saw a clear superpower waiting to be unleashed: buildability. Lunchables gives kids a snackable moment of creativity as the food that’s “Built to Be Eaten.”

The strategy aimed to give Lunchables an active, emotional role: inspire kids to build anything in the world out of Lunchables by turning their world into “Lunchabuilds.”

Execution

To get all types of kids building with Lunchables, we designed over 30 unique food builds—from dinosaurs to baseball diamonds to SpongeBob SquarePants—using just our product. We called them “Lunchabuilds” and created blueprints for each one.

And we encouraged kids to start building on their own with a brand new call-to-action: “Lunchabuild This.”

We then activated the idea by literally turning real-world objects into Lunchabuilds. We turned city buses into “Lunchabuses” and showed “Lunchabikes” next to a rack of city bikes. We placed giant Lunchables bears at city zoos and posted Lunchables bulldozers next to construction sites—each one serving as a spark of inspiration for kids. Over 1,100 contextual OOH placements and experiential installations came to life. We put them in places kids were—on the way to school, at the zoo, etc.—prompting them to build with Lunchables.

But we didn’t stop there. To drive sales, every ad was scannable and linked directly to our rebuilt e-commerce site, letting families buy that build instantly. We developed unique QR codes for each build and worked with Instacart to make a seamless purchasing experience—just click “Order This Build,” and it would automatically be in your cart. You could order a cat. Or a bulldozer. And instantly get the packs and blueprints needed to build them yourself.