For 30 years Lunchables has helped kids build their lunch, their way. But sales had flattened, and Lunchables needed to transform the way kids looked at the product. Lunchables had always been a product for a child’s imagination. At a time in their lives when most things were decided for them, this was their one opportunity to create their lunches in their own unique fashion. So we began to look at Lunchables the way kids do, seeing what they could become rather than just what they are. Kids don’t see cheese and crackers; they see an opportunity to play with their food and build anything they want. In that way, it’s more like a toy. So our goal was to recapture that magic and show up in the very place we knew kids would see it.

We saw how much kids loved building with Lunchables, and we realized that you could build almost anything out of them—from rockets and robots to the Eiffel Tower—using just what’s in the pack. So we designed a range of edible builds and the blueprints needed to make them, and we repositioned Lunchables as “The Toy You Can Eat.”

Then we went where no snack has gone before: the toy aisle. To prove Lunchables really are an edible toy, we decided to bring them (and our builds) into the toy store, showing up exactly where kids would see them.

We watched how kids used the product, and we realized they got as much enjoyment from building with the food as they did from actually eating it. What has made Lunchables unique and beloved for the past 30 years is that they let kids create whatever they can imagine using just the pieces in the pack. Yet that had never been a core focus of the brand message. So we shifted our entire strategy to make buildability the primary focus of our product and to show that this really is an edible toy. That changed everything from the way the product was packaged, to how it was shown in print and on television, and even to which stores it showed up in.

To prove that Lunchables is “The Toy You Can Eat,” we partnered with America’s most famous toy store, FAO Schwarz in New York City, filling its legendary Fifth Avenue windows with larger-than-life pizza UFOs, cracker rockets and pretzel horses.

We worked with FAO’s in-house creative director and a fabricating company to turn our Lunchables builds (“Lunchabuilds”), into massive pieces of crackers, cheese and ham that kids could walk around and get photos with. Inside the store, our giant Lunchables train became the centerpiece of the experience.

Also inside, we put our actual food builds on display, just like real toys. Kids could see them up close and take home blueprints for each one, or scan the QR code to pull up instructions for each build.

The activation began in early September, as kids were out shopping for back-to-school necessities, and billboards around the city promoted the experience.

The experience was FAO’s biggest partnership ever, earning coverage from the Today show, Bloomberg News, Fox News, HYPEBEAST and others. In a first for Lunchables, the news also showed up in toy-related outlets like Toy News, the Toy Insider and Toy Wizards.

We handed out 2,500 sets of blueprints in store alone and launched premium Lunchabuilds kits for kids on FAO Schwartz’s site, which sold out in two minutes. On the first day alone, the experience generated over 100 million impressions.

It also inspired kids to start sharing their own builds online, ones we hadn’t even thought of—from pretzel giraffes and cracker airplanes to a yellow (cheese) submarine. Even TikTok star Zach King created his own massive “FAO-style” Lunchables cracker-stacker castle, generating over 12 million views.

Most important, sales of Lunchables rose to an all-time high, with a double digit-increase for the first time in five years.