Maple Leafs Foods’ “Lunchmate,” a prepackaged lunch kit, was born out of a consumer need for a convenient, ready-to-eat kids lunch that required no time to prep. It was the loved, but permissible, quick fix solution for both parents and kids.

But then COVID happened. Kids were no longer in school. The problem for Lunchmate was clear; no school meant no school lunches. The brand was quickly falling out of consideration with parents, so they had to act fast to create a new kind of usage occasion to make Lunchmate relevant outside the school cafeteria.

Maple Leaf Foods was a new client for FUSE Create and this was their first assignment; to reverse Lunchmate consumption declines in order to reignite consumer demands. They needed to generate penetration growth and buy-rate by reestablishing Lunchmate as a convenient, DIY, and fun meal solution for kids at home.

Schooling and working from home during this pandemic has been hard, and at times, a little boring. But adults aren’t the only ones who’ve been bored, in fact it’s been kids who have suffered the most. Kids miss play time with friends, recess, after-school programs, and simply having fun with carefree abandon. And with very little to break up the day, parents are having a hard time finding ways to stimulate their kids, motivate them to eat, and give them little things to look forward to. Plus, it’s the parents themselves who end up being the ones to stimulate and play with their kids, all the while trying to WFH.

There was an opportunity to reassert what the brand stands for; less about convenience and more about the DIY and fun aspect of the brand. Lunchmate could not only help kids with lunch, but at home, the DIY nature of the product could help with the boredom too. A new creative platform that addressed these current barriers could reignite the love with lapsed users. So they positioned Lunchmate as a way to “put fun on the table” at home.

Ferris Bueller said “You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.” They knew this was the challenge parents had been facing for much of 2020 and 2021. Kids have been trapped inside, bored beyond belief. Insufferably bored. And when kids get bored, they can turn into lil’ monsters. So that’s what they did.

Lunchmate uses animated monsters as part of their branding. So, they took to the internet and found footage of kids who were bored out of their minds and then turned those kids within the footage into a bored lil’ monster, named “Bordimer”, the most boredest monster ever.

Bordimer became one of the Lunchmate monsters. A character parents could recognize, and one kids saw in themselves. They animated over the existing footage of the kids acting bored and just like any bored kid, Bordimer wanted nothing more than to have fun. So, they leveraged the other Lunchmate monsters to help take Bordimer out of boredom, and into “Lunchmate Land,” a colourful world full of discovery and DIY fun, made up entirely of Lunchmate products, of course.

Bordimer delivered. The boredest monster ever generated some rather exciting results and successfully changed the way consumers, particularly lapsed ones, perceived Lunchmate, and they have the results to prove it: 640%: Sales grew YOY by more than 37%, surpassing the initial sales growth target by 640% and the campaign saw a 6.7% lift in consideration on YouTube, ranking Best in Class compared to Food & Beverage studies run in the past 12 months, with close to 200K new consumers now willing to consider purchasing Lunchmate. Bordimer reached more than 9M people, earning over 47.7M impressions, 20% higher than expectations andhe 30sec TikTok video, a first for LunchMate on this platform, earned more than 33K engagements and saw an average watch time of close to 22 seconds.

For a brand with its purpose built into its name, LunchMate, they were able to change the way consumers perceived the brand. They found an opportunity with kids and parents at home, leaned into the DIY aspect of the product, and leveraged the fun monsters to create a new usage occasion beyond the functional nature of the product. And parents, and their lil’ monsters, quickly adopted.

Based on the success of this campaign, Maple Leafs Foods has since added a second brand to FUSE Create’s creative assignment.