Creating The Trend To Blend

Client

Mushroom Council

Challenge

Fresh mushrooms are one of the trendiest foods found in the supermarket with sales outpacing most other items in the produce section. In fact, CNN recently declared mushrooms “the new grocery aisle celebrities.” How did we get here? It wasn’t pure luck. The work began strategically and methodically several years ago when The Mushroom Council^®approached Curious Plot to help create a new category for mushrooms appropriate for these “plant-forward” times.

Solution

Chefs, menu developers, home cooks say hello to “The Blend^™” – an entirely new culinary technique we helped The Mushroom Council bring to professional and home kitchens that blends finely chopped, fresh mushrooms with ground meat for burgers and other dishes to make them more delicious, nutritious and sustainable.

To create a category, point of entry matters. Rather than start with grocers or consumers, we first targeted foodservice operators, chefs at restaurants and menu developers for K-12, colleges and cafeterias. By first engaging the influential foodservice audience about The Blend, we created media interest and consumer awareness. We collaborated with the James Beard Foundation for the Blended Burger Project^®, an annual competition in which we inspired chefs to menu their own creative take on a blended burger. Over five years, more than 1,000 chefs participated. The campaign resulted in more than 450 local and national blended burger feature stories including The Today Show, NPR, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, Food & Wine and more.

With The Blend^™ widespread in foodservice, our next phase called for broadening our reach by targeting consumers directly. This shift challenged our team to deliver a bold digital campaign that was disruptive, thumb-stopping and completely different than what commodity boards typically produce.

The “Remix Your Recipe” campaign features animated crimini mushrooms cascading down the screen with vocals encouraging people to “Ju-ju-ju-ju-just add ‘shrooms!” and “Leave room for ‘shrooms!” to create tastier burgers.

In addition to an interactive landing page with tips on how to blend, health benefits and recipes, the integrated campaign consisted of YouTube pre-roll videos, programmatic banner ads and social media posts strategically placed to target the tastebuds of flexitarian consumers. All told, the digital campaign reached 32 million viewers over four months, further driving mushrooms up the staple scale at grocers.

To increase reach, we developed multimedia collaborations with both Bon Appetit and Food Network, featuring sponsored content, magazine inserts, broadcast segments, television ads and blended burger recipe competitions. All told, these collaborations have reached consumers more than 130 million times.

As these initiatives have unfolded, Whole Foods, The Today Show, Kroger, Fast Company, grocery retailers, influencers and dozens of other outlets each year have placed mushrooms atop annual trend lists. It’s not an accident. It’s a concerted effort from The Mushroom Council and Curious Plot. We don’t just follow food trends, we create them.

Brand Launch