05 April 2023, UK: Our consumer facing platform ‘Love My Salad’ is celebrating the success of its budget campaign, created to encourage British shoppers to buy and cook more vegetables.
Cooking with affordable vegetables
Acknowledging these challenging times in the grocery sector, with rising food prices alongside inflation, the team at Love My Salad set out to create a series of activities to highlight the role of everyday vegetables in healthy, affordable cooking.
Brand Manager Annelies Blaauwkamer says: “Increasing prices are making life hard for consumers, which is why we focussed our campaign on the basics: affordable vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes, leek and cauliflower that are readily available to everyone.”
In autumn of last year the campaign launched with a cross-channel initiative using social media content, social advertising, and an online budget cookbook which was downloaded by 5,000 consumers. In total, the campaign reached over 762,000 people and included activity such as 50 food and budget focussed influencers being sent recipe boxes to allow them to make cost effective, vegetable based meals and most importantly, to post about them.
Live cooking along with influencer, Claire Thomson
This year the Love My Salad campaign secured the chef and popular food writer Claire Thomson @5oclockapron as a brand ambassador. Claire devised three recipes, two of which were cooked on 25th March on an Instagram live, watched by over 28,000 followers. The live cook along was hosted by Bristol community kitchen The Square Food Foundation where six families were invited to cook with Claire and were supplied with all the ingredients they needed to make Claire’s ingenious cauliflower cake and vegetable slaw. Ten of Claire’s Instagram followers also received a recipe box delivered to their homes, allowing them to cook along live with the team in Bristol. The reach* of Claire’s activity was 137,000 and participants of the workshop who posted had a combined following of over 19,500.
Peter Kane, who took part in the workshop with his two daughters said: “Great fun – learning how easy it was to make delicious vegetable led food – the kids loved it and none of the usual grumbles at dinner time – as they’d created it from scratch.”
187 receive free recipe kits for vegetable fritters
Last week Claire shared her recipe for adaptable vegetable fritters on her Instagram reels, watched by 61,000 Instagram users. 187 families who regularly receive recipe kits from The Square Food Foundation will cook the veggie fritters this week when the ingredients are delivered to their doors.
Claire says: “Cooking with vegetables day-to-day is my default setting as a home cook, chef and food writer. Not a day passes in my kitchen when I haven’t chopped some vegetable or other to add to my daily cooking. I recommend you follow the seasons, explore the wacky and wonderful world of vegetables with your family at home in your kitchen, talk and taste and you’re winning at life, together.”
Kelly Northcroft, who is Rijk Zwaan’s Sales manager here in the UK is looking forward to continuing to develop the Love My salad campaign. She says: “Our objective is to help consumers to enjoy cooking with vegetables and to share the message with them that eating well with fresh vegetables really needn’t be costly. Working with social media influencers has helped us to spread the word quickly and effectively because they are close to our target audience of busy families.”
*Reach is defined as the number of unique users that saw an Instagram post or story on any given day.
