These days, everyone’s removing artificial stuff from their food, and they love advertising it. But when it came to re-launching Kraft’s iconic mac & cheese, we knew we had to do things differently, because the power of suggestion is strong. So we decided not to advertise the change at all. When the new recipe was finally ready, Kraft packaged it in old boxes, changing only the ingredient label. Then we watched as millions of people unknowingly participated in an activity that promoted Kraft's new recipe: eating it without noticing a thing. After three months and 50 million boxes sold, we announced that we’d pulled off the largest blind taste test in history, and that America’s silence had proven the new recipe tasted the same, and we continued to watch America love it for all of 2016.

Kraft removed artificial flavors, preservatives and dyes from their mac and cheese in 2015. Although Kraft originally planned to introduce the new recipe with big fanfare and advertise it immediately, we counseled them to stay quiet for a few months to prove nobody would notice a change in taste. In September 2015, Kraft began printing 50 million new boxes that looked exactly like their old ones, updating only the ingredient label to covertly sell the new recipe. They began shipping these boxes to stores nationwide in November 2015. In December 2015, stores began selling the new recipe, unbeknownst to their employees or customers.

Kraft canceled all planned advertising about the new recipe during December, January and February, shifting the campaign’s entire media plan by three months in order to help us pull off a fair and unbiased blind taste test. Finally, on March 7, 2016, we announced what we’d done.

The taste test was covered by hundreds of media outlets, from E! to the New York Times, and 92% of the articles had a positive tone. Stephen Colbert even devoted his entire Late Show monologue to the campaign.

Three weeks after announcing that we’d pulled off the largest blind taste test in history, the campaign had over one billion earned media impressions. It also generated a 291% increase in visits to kraftmacandcheese.com compared to the previous month.

Most importantly, 50 million boxes of mac and cheese were sold during the three-month taste test period, a figure consistent with the same quarter of the previous year, and less than 40 people reported a change in taste via social and consumer hotline channels. Those figures helped us eliminate any concern about a change in taste, because they proved that this Kraft Mac & Cheese still tasted like Kraft Mac & Cheese.