Vegetable breeding company Rijk Zwaan is celebrating the success of its consumer-facing ‘Love My Salad’ campaign, created to encourage British shoppers to buy and cook more 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: “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 activities 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.
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 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: “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.”
Last week Claire shared her recipe for adaptable vegetable fritters on her Instagram reels, watched by 61,000 Instagram users.
Claire: “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.
For more information: 
Rijk Zwaan
Love My Salad Instagram: @Lovemysalad_UK
www.rijkzwaan.com
www.lovemysalad.com