Launching Nestlé Professional’s plant-based food brand with fresh, fast, inspiring, brand-building content.

The story

Nestlé Professional are on a mission to accelerate their sustainability journey and become carbon neutral by 2022.

To achieve this mission, and to give their casual dining restaurant customers delicious, sustainable plant-based products to add more vegan and vegetarian menu options;

Nestlé Professional developed Garden Gourmet – a totally plant-based range of professional culinary products. Because the more people embrace plant-based eating, the better the world will be.

The challenge

The product range was brand new to market, so Garden Gourmet needed to act swiftly to:

• Launch the brand, build their organic social media presence and reach target customers with brilliant, personalised paid media
• Build consumer preference so their B2B customers could put the best plant-based options in front of their diners
• Support sales conversations with key target casual dining restaurants

To hit their ambitious growth targets, their products needed to get onto key customer menus, and beat the ambitious, growing competition. The imperative for speed was heightened as sales meetings were happening quickly, and their social media channels were empty.

What we did

We needed to launch the brand QUICKLY.

Within less than a week of kicking off the project we created a data-led strategy and messaging hierarchy specifically for Garden Gourmet’s target customers. The strategy was built into a phased content plan, which allowed us to prioritise the content that Garden Gourmet needed in order to make impact, fast.

Within four weeks, our launch strategy and the content was approved by the category team and visible on Garden Gourmet’s social channels – ready to support their sales meetings and build a strong, plant-based brand.

Because of the success of the launch, we’re now Garden Gourmet’s lead content strategy agency. We create and design the brand’s social and paid content in line with Nestlé Professional’s stringent guidelines. To reduce content waste, we use and improve Garden Gourmet’s existing creative assets to create a sustainable content ecosystem. Saving precious time and budget.

Together, we’ve overcome challenges like Covid-19 which meant that pubs and casual dining restaurants had closed. But Garden Gourmet still urgently needed digital content that was time-sensitive and could reach and engage with their audiences whilst in lockdown, to make sure Garden Gourmet is the plant-based provider of choice after re-opening.

The Results

Nestlé Professional brands are well-known and well-loved. However, internal processes can slow the response time to a rapidly changing plant-based food market. We need to always work fast to combat the risk of their competitors getting there first.

The Brilliant Way™ of ‘execute faster, learn quicker, repeat’ was a first for Nestlé Professional in the UK. Garden Gourmet is now considered the benchmark across the business for how to produce content that engages target audiences at pace.