Maple Leafs Foods’ Lunchmate, a prepackaged lunch-kit for kids, was born out of a consumer need for convenient, ready-to-eat lunches that required zero prep. They quickly became a lunchbox staple that saved parents time and kids loved to eat. Enter COVID-19, and the stay-at-home measures.

Staying at home meant working and schooling from home. A lot changed, including the daily routine of packing kids’ lunches and as a result, Lunchmate was quickly falling out of consideration with parents, and losing sales. To combat this decline, they had to create a new reason to enjoy Lunchmate, to
make it relevant outside the school cafeteria.

In addition, stay-at-home measures forced kids indoors; no outside time, no playing with friends, no parks, playgrounds, or playdates. We soon learned (often the hard way) that being stuck inside day after day, kids got bored, and it was left to parents to entertain them in-between ZOOM meetings and
their own struggles with working from home.

When kids get hungry and bored, their temperament can turn them into lil’ monsters.

Every Luchmate kit included lunch ingredients kids had to put together themselves; so rather than continuing to focus the convenience of the prepackaged meal, to combat boredom, they focused on the do-it-yourself (DIY) nature of the product, and gave kids not just something to eat but more importantly, something to do.

Maple Leaf Foods knew first-hand that parents were struggling at home, juggling work while educating and entertaining their children. And social media acted as a window into this conundrum, with video upon video revealing bored kids at home, not knowing what to do with themselves, other than to frustrate their parents. Those videos became a source of inspiration for Lunchmate’s new DIY positioning; stave off that dreaded boredom so bored kids don’t turn into lil monsters. And since much of the Lunchmate branding included animated monster characters, not only could they own this new usage occasion due to the unique DIY nature of the product, but also because of the equity in the Lunchmate branding.

So they turned to social media, and turned real-life videos of bored kids at home into dynamic animated versions of themselves, creating a ‘new’ Lunchmate monster called “Bordimer” (the name Mortimer combined with “bored”). They depicted Bordimer in scenes parents could relate to, because they were real UGC moments from homes across Canada. In the campaign, they incorporated the other Lunchmate characters to help take Bordimer out of boredom and into “Lunchmate Land”, a colourful, animated
world full of discovery and DIY fun. In the end, kids saw themselves in Bordimer and
parents saw a solution in Lunchmate.

They developed a 30sec and 15sec video for online. The campaign ran on core social channels (Facebook and Instagram), plus the digital coupon site FLIPP. To reach a younger parent, they built a custom content strategy for TikTok – a first for the brand - including a 24hr media takeover with a customized, EDM version of the spot. From the music to the edit, it was uniquely EDM, and uniquely specific for TikTok.

For a brand with its purpose built into its name (LunchMate), this new DIY positioning proved successful. They were able to introduce a new usage occasion and reason to buy Lunchmate. They shifted consumer perceptions and brought the brand to life in a new and relevant way for kids and parents alike at home: Sales grew by more than 37% YOY, surpassing the initial sales growth target by 640%! The campaign saw a 6.7% lift in Consideration on YouTube, ranking Best in Class compared to Food & Beverage studies in the past 12 months. Bordimer reached 9M people, earning over 47.7M impressions, 20% higher than expected. The 30sec TikTok video, a first for LunchMate, earned more than 33K engagements in 24hrs.