Voilà

The Objective

Untapping new audiences via #FoodTok community trends

Founded in 1907, Sobeys Inc. is the second largest supermarket chain in Canada, with over 1,500 stores operating from coast to coast. Voilà, the chain’s cutting-edge online grocery home delivery service, promises its customers guaranteed freshness, straight to their door. Voilà, the new entrant to the market food delivery service, was facing a lot of competition in the marketplace and needed to boost familiarity amongst their millennial target audience. With TikTok quickly establishing itself as the source for viral food trends, responsible for selling out ingredients in stores during recipe frenzies, Voilà looked to the platform to acquire new customers and gain website conversions with a first-to-market concept.

The Solution

Utilizing Spark Ads and Creators to turn trends into trials

It’s no secret that the world’s biggest food trends are being driven by TikTok. And Voilà was ready to make their move, by taking advantage of an untapped opportunity that intercepted cultural moments happening organically on the platform in a way no competitors in Canada had yet. The brand leveraged the #FoodTok community and teamed up with well-known food creators to develop #TikTokMadeMeTryIt recipe entertainment, with a Voilà twist.

Typically, when users see a trending recipe, they save it and wait until their next grocery shop to pick up the ingredients to finally try it, risking the trend passing or forgetting about it altogether. To help shorten the path-to-purchase, Voilà harnessed these trends with a first-to-market idea: introducing #Trending2Table. The #Trending2Table concept successfully drove users directly from the creator recipe videos to a pre-populated cart on Voilà.ca that facilitated their yearning to recreate the trending dish themselves.

Voilà’s data-driven campaign was brought to life by checking trends in TikTok Creative Center and combining those rankings with insights from other sources using FCB’s Trend Index to predict what would become popular next. Once the trending recipes were identified, the brand partnered with well-known #FoodTok creators such as @nutrientmatters and @urbansizzle to quickly create mouthwatering videos featuring the recipes. Each video encouraged users to join the trend by ordering the ingredients from Voilà. With a single tap, users were taken to pre-populated check out carts with everything they needed to make the featured recipe. Furthermore, in order to drive extended reach and engagement, the creator-led content was amplified using Spark Ads, a native ad format that enables brands like Volià to leverage organic TikTok posts and their features in their campaigns. Finally, once a customer’s order was delivered, Volià’s CRM auto-triggered a follow-up email with the recipe and a link back to the TikTok recipe video to make it as easy as possible for users to turn the trend into meals.

The Results

Successfully turning recipe trends into trials

Volià’s #Trending2Table campaign broke through traditional grocery habits by intercepting cultural food moments with an authentic native-to-platform creative and media approach that effectively drove brand awareness and sales. As the first grocery delivery brand to tap into viral commerce, the campaign propelled Voilà beyond the noise of its competition with a first-to-market concept that successfully increased trials amongst its target audience. The #Trending2Table campaign delivered a 200% higher clickthrough rate, with an impressive 8x increase in orders and 11x increase in new Voilà customers, which was a notable 1100% lift in new weekly users vs. the benchmark average of other Voilà ads. Plus, the creator-led videos proved to keep users engaged with the unique concept, delivering over 3.4 million views and more than 40,000 engagements.

#Trending2Table has been a strong conversion-driver for Voilà, one that maximized efficiency in driving new user acquisition. And if that’s not all, the campaign put Voilà on multiple podiums, including winning the first-ever TikTok Power of Entertainment award in partnership with the 2023 Canadian Marketing Association Awards. Moreover, a 2023 Cannes Silver Lion in Social & Influencer, a Gold in E-Commerce, Silver in Social Media and Bronze in Delivery Services at the 2023 Effies, plus Gold for Best in Consumer Engagement and Silver for Best Use of Real-Time Data at the 2022 Media Innovation Awards. Now that’s a winning trend!