Food Collective

Client
Unilever Food Solutions

Unilever logo in white

Building bridges to end-customers

A powerful cause-marketing loyalty campaign that broke through all the barriers of an intermediated market.

Unilever Food Solutions sells quality food ingredients to the hospitality industry, made of up 80,000 restaurants, cafes, pubs, clubs, caterers, aged care and healthcare venues across Australia and New Zealand.


Key achievements

Handshake icon

Direct relationship with their customers and valuable sales data

Dinner plate icon

200,000 meals have been provided to Aussies in need


 

The Challenge

To fulfil their plans for growth, Unilever Food Solutions (UFS) decided to strengthen relationships with their end-customers.

However, UFS sells its high-quality food ingredients through supplier partners and doesn’t interact with end-customers directly.

UFS understood they needed strong reasons to make customers connect with the UFS brand – they had to make their relationships with end-customers meaningful and relevant.

 

The Solution

To build bridges to UFS’s end-customers, Incremental sought to inject the UFS brand with passion and purpose.

Showcasing how UFS helped the Australian community and the environment developed into the key marketing strategy to build relationships with end-customers.

Through research, Incremental pinpointed how much food the foodservice industry wasted: at least 40% of food was discarded. After further research, Incremental identified that OzHarvest as a key player rescuing and redistributing food for supermarkets.

To turn their marketing strategy into a campaign, Incremental advised UFS to partner OzHarvest.

Incremental showed OzHarvest how food waste in the foodservice industry represented a significant untapped opportunity. Incremental also positioned UFS as an enabler and sponsor, inspiring foodservice businesses on how to reduce food waste.

By partnering UFS and OzHarvest, an innovative cause marketing and loyalty marketing program was born: Food Collective.

The campaign’s heart held a singular purpose: to help those in need a receive a healthy meal.

To support this simple goal, Food Collective gave UFS’s end-customers multiple ways to get involved, including:

  • By donating surplus food to OzHarvest, UFS’s foodservice customers could redistribute their surplus to those in need
  • By helping to raising money via a purchase-for-donation mechanic, UFS’s foodservice customers could easily make donations to people in need

A wide range of tactics and communication supported the Food Collective campaign.

By leveraging our cloud-based Loyalty Platform, Incremental built a campaign microsite quickly and cost-effectively. This campaign microsite captured customer profiles and sales data for UFS. A PR launch and communication plan utilised content and digital marketing, plus feet on the street, to drive traffic to the campaign microsite.

The partnership allowed us to create positive brand associations with OzHarvest and UFS and provide a holistic solution to the hospitality industry.

Results

With Food Collective, Incremental created a unique opportunity for UFS to contribute to the broader Australian community.

By supporting people in need, UFS showed its end-customers the passion and purpose underpinning their brand.

Importantly, these brand values built an emotional connection between UFS and its end-customers. These emotional connections give UFS a direct relationship with the hospitality businesses that buy UFS products through suppliers.

Food Collective infographic

"Thank you for yet again a fantastic effort - with the right planning and preparation and excellence in execution. I know that we would not have been able to pull this off without Incremental."

Yezdi Daruwalla

Unilever Food Solutions Australasia
Managing Director

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