Upscale dinner delivery service Plated recently put its meals on wheels for a nine-city mobile tour that brought its pre-portioned seasonal ingredients and original recipes to consumers across the country on a retrofitted 1970s-era Airstream trailer. The goal: to bring the brand’s mission of helping consumers cook more and live better to life with a premium multisensory experience. The solution: the Road to Discovery Tour.
At each stop of the nine-week program, which wrapped in October, Plated invited consumers to take a journey through the brand’s core pillars: source, curate and deliver. After climbing aboard the Airstream, which was fully customized to reflect a modern home kitchen, visitors participated in a series of engagements designed to help them discover new ingredients, recipes and cooking techniques.
To begin the experience, consumers explored an installation of living herbs located on the exterior of the trailer. They were then directed to a recipe stand outside the door to the Airstream, where they could choose their favorite Plated recipe from a collection of six recipe cards.
Next, consumers were welcomed into the vehicle and asked to take a personal flavor profile quiz on an iPad. Participants then received a recommended herb blend that matched their flavor profile, along with a sample of the blend in a branded spice jar. As an added bonus, those who took the quiz were automatically entered into a sweepstakes to win a free one-month Plated subscription.
Participants were then encouraged to explore the rest of the Airstream’s interior where they could engage with spices displayed on a custom table, learn how Plated meals and ingredients are delivered and acquire cooking tips via a flatscreen TV.
The tour also included daily cooking demonstrations led by Plated’s culinary team, which used a mix of the brand’s recipes. In addition to the Plated demos, several tour stops featured guest chefs from local restaurants who provided step-by-step preparation techniques.
“There’s inherently a level of skepticism around ordering [our product] so [the tour] is a way to give people a way to see and touch and feel the product itself and watch it being prepared from box to plate,” says Rachel Horowitz, director of business development at Plated. “I think it was a way to tell the story in a more meaningful fashion, and also to communicate some of our brand pillars and the ways we differentiate from our competitors.”
The activation earned some tasty results. More than 16,000 consumers boarded the Airstream and, with the help of a microsite, social impressions totaled 4.8 million. Bon appetite. Agency: TH Productions, New York City.
