A B2B campaign that got chefs to pay attention to mayonnaise

Love at First Bite, Hellmann's

The Challenge

When a chef starts their day, they usually have a 100 different things on their mind—from making sure they’re buying only the freshest ingredients to ensuring that every plate that goes out is perfect. In the middle of all that, the last thing they care about is the mayonnaise they’re using. Our job was to make them care.

The Idea: Love at First Bite

There's something that happens in that first bite. When hunger and curiosity meet taste and emotion. If it doesn’t match the eaters expectation, it can spell disaster. But if done right, it has the power to create love at first bite, and turn a first-time customer into a regular.

Creating that perfect first bite takes attention to detail, it takes the best ingredients, every element has to be perfectly balanced—including the seemingly small element that is the mayonnaise.

The Food Truck Experiment

80% of customers say that one bite is all it takes to know if they’ll return to a restaurant. We set out to prove it.

We partnered with 5 of Chicago’s most popular delis to try and create love at first bite. Each chef took to the streets in a food truck to serve bite-sized portions of their signature sandwich made with Hellmann’s mayo. Along with their sandwich, they also gave out coupons for customers to come down to the deli and redeem a full-sized sandwich.

Love Stories

To take the experiment further, we filmed a series of interviews with chefs and their regulars talking about their food “love stories”. We asked them to describe the first bite that kept them coming back for more, over and over again with as much emotion as they could, and they did not disappoint.

Make it Count

We also went to the places we knew chefs would visit every day—farmers’ markets, meat markets, wholesale grocery stores—to place contextual posters reminding them not to waste all that effort on an inferior mayo.

Love it? Show it.

Even though this was primarily a B2B campaign, we created some customer-facing materials that we sent to chefs to place in their restaurants. The front-of-house placements encouraged customers to share their positive experiences on social media, while reinforcing the Hellmann’s brand in the process.

The Results

The customers who took part in the Food Truck Experiment overwhelmingly agreed that it was love at first bite, with 350 of them returning to their new favorite delis a week later.