Chefs in Conversation

PR / Creative / Digital / Social

The task

jellybean was tasked by client Mizkan Euro with creating a campaign to inspire and educate chefs and mixologists on the versatility of Honteri – a sweet, mirin-style condiment traditionally used in Japanese cooking, but with multiple as-yet untapped applications for food and drink. Most importantly, we had to get the product into professionals’ hands so they could sample ‘The Chefs’ Secret Weapon’.

The solution

Set during Covid times, we created ‘Chefs in Conversation’ – a multimedia, chef-to-chef series with an engaging and innovatively staged piece of video content at its heart.

We challenged our two protagonists, Mizkan development chef Ron Laity and award-winning mixologist Rich Woods alias ‘The Cocktail Guy’ to take part in a game of recipe one-upmanship.

The campaign comms strategy employed data gated sampling and was pushed out through digital and social both organic and paid, effectively targeting our two core audiences of chefs and mixologists.

The results

Product sample requests 216% of KPI
Instagram follower growth of 300%
Social engagements 219% of KPI
Social organic impressions +3,283% of KPI
Over 400,000 total impressions across trade media, Instagram and YouTube
Introduced product to a previously untapped market of mixologists and bartenders

“The idea behind the ‘Chefs in Conversation’ campaign was to deliver engaging and inspiring ‘foodie’ content created by chefs for chefs during a difficult time for the foodservice industry. jellybean demonstrated strong creative thinking, as well as the ability and flexibility to deliver this campaign within a short amount of time and despite the challenges of the pandemic. They were able to use creative solutions to face the challenge of filming our two chefs in different locations and the results were great. The video content had a very organic feel to it as if the two chefs were in the same room. I’m very pleased with the campaign in general and more specifically with the engagement results which were driven by a great campaign idea and a strong execution from jellybean. Well done!”