Summary: We repositioned Pambac cornmeal for the modern Romanian cuisine through a new packaging design and a creative recipe campaign. The campaign inspired people to go beyond the traditional polenta with cheese and sour cream, and attracted new consumers.
Much loved by Romanians, polenta (mămăligă) was often used as a bread alternative in rural areas. The traditional dish of polenta, cheese and sour cream never left Romanian cooking, but cornmeal itself didn’t keep up with the times. The visual territory of contemporary cornmeal products in Romania favoured generic images of corn and polenta, reflective of long-standing cooking traditions. On supermarket shelves, cornmeal has always looked like a generic, undifferentiated merchandise, only useful for the good old mămăligă.
Pambac, a company with a history of turning cereals into healthy and tasty products, was looking for an idea to differentiate its cornmeal packaging on the shelf and move away from industry clichés. They approached us with this challenge, asking to preserve their heritage colour (dark green) and their current corporate logo.
An extra challenge we at Storience knew we had to face was that polenta was not a popular food choice among millennials. Here, we saw an opportunity we had to take.
We started from an insight: in many other countries cornmeal is used more creatively, for recipes that shine on upper scale restaurant menus, as well as in vegetarian or vegan cooking. So why not in Romania, too?
We decided the product’s appearance was not enough to break with the industry norm. To inspire people to go beyond the traditional polenta with cheese and sour cream, the brand needed a new discourse centred on creativity. This would not only generate more uses for the product, but it would also attract younger generations towards an ingredient that had been only popular with the elderly.
While the new packaging shows shelves holding everyday ingredients, inviting the onlooker for new recipe ideas, our launch campaign demonstrated the new positioning in the real world. Called the Cornmeal Relay Race, the launch campaign invited food bloggers to create new cornmeal recipes and promote them to their audiences.
80%
increase in web traffic generated
by the launch campaign
For five weeks, local food blogger Mazilique imagined new ways to embed this traditional ingredient into the modern Romanian cuisine, wowing tens of thousands of young food enthusiasts. All of Mazilique’s recipes can be found on her blog or on social media by following the #StafetaCuMalai hashtag.
Despite the low project budget (below 10,000 EUR), the results made our client happy and willing to continue the campaign.
The campaign helped a lot in making the Pambac cornmeal recognisable on supermarket shelves, as its packaging was completely changed. We had an 80% increase in web traffic and great social media reactions. It is a very beautiful and original campaign that deserves to be continued.
Visit Mazilique’s blog for the full recipe.
