In 2019, Wendy’s took significant steps to bolster its salad product quality by investing in a new type of lettuce. The new lettuce was more sustainable, better tasting, and 100% grown in Canadian greenhouses. They planned to launch during the seasonal upswing in salad demand between Q1 and Q2, when people become more aware of the need to eat healthier in anticipation of the summer.

The launch campaign had four main objectives:

Objective #1 - Increase brand sentiment on Twitter to 28% positive share of sentiment.

Objective #2 - Increase core salad sales by 7.5% YoY.

Objective #3 – Increase same-restaurant sales by 3% YoY.

Objective #4 - Increase share of QSR salad nationally by 10% - from 12.5% market share to between 13.5% and 14%.

We wanted to spread positivity online and in our greenhouse. In our research, we came across a study that showed plants also benefit from social connection. They grow better when consistently spoken to.

That was our lightbulb moment. If both people and plants benefit from positive social interaction, we could get people to send messages of love to our plants, creating a positive connection from our greenhouses to our consumers.

We launched a social campaign featuring social videos and posts that encouraged Canadians to use the hashtag #GrownWithLove, to tweet messages of love and support to our greenhouse lettuce that we read out to the plants as they grew. We even shared back to people a video of their tweet being read to the lettuce.

We had to understand why people were turning to comfort food. We found that it wasn’t so much the taste of comfort food, but the positive emotions people felt when eating it. Research shows that people are more likely to engage in emotional eating and food consumption when their psychological needs, particularly needs for social connection, are unfulfilled.

But at a time where people couldn’t be physically closer, being virtually closer wasn’t helping. 71% of Canadians believed people to be more hostile and negative on social media.

If people were turning to comfort foods because of a lack of social connection, perhaps we could use this insight to craft a campaign that fostered positive social connections while somehow simultaneously imbuing our new salads with the positive emotions associated with comfort foods.

In addition to social media videos and posts, we used TV ads and a Twitter Spotlight takeover to push Canadians to talk to our lettuce.

We connected with Dr. Tijana Blanusa, Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society to determine the time, frequency, and distance from which we should communicate with the plants for the best result.

From there we conducted a little experiment, having one side of the greenhouse act as control (i.e. not getting any love) so we could see if our efforts actually made the lettuce grow better. We even held a live ‘lovestream’ on Twitter, where we read out chat messages of love to our lettuce in real time.

After our lettuces had their fill of love, they were harvested and sent to Wendy’s locations across Canada, where we made special packaging featuring the messages shared with the lettuce. We shared the unique packaging on our social media feeds.

Please see results in Confidential Information for the Jury.