As a food retailer, Delhaize’s main mission is to make it easy for people to eat a little better every day. Better as in more healthy and more tasteful. Life is not perfect, but we think better eating is possible for everyone, with a little help it can be done.

We all know it: veggies are good for us, we should eat plenty. But statistics show that children are only eating 30% of the healthy daily intake of vegetables.

How can Delhaize, the n°1 supermarket in Belgium, make it easier for parents to feed their kids veggies? How can we demonstrate leadership in the fresh category, an important but unbranded product category?

We asked kids what certain veggies looked like, what they made them think of. And we used 12 of the coolest names they invented on actual packaging in the stores, and in communication.

By renaming veggies with magical, fairytale-like names(co-created with kids). That’s why carrot became an orange rocket. We activated children’s phantasy and invited parents to present the veggies in a different, more appealing way.

By more or less making kids forget they are eating veggies, they will actually taste them and eventually learn to eat them: a gnome trumpet goes down way easier than an oyster mushroom.

Everybody knows veggies are good for you, and everybody knows we should eat more of them. So no need to be educational, it wouldn’t work anyway.

Veggies suffer from an image problem. Making kids eat veggies is not easy: young parents know it, older parents remember it for the rest of their lives. That was the starting point. We use the power of enthusiasm: by introducing fairytale-like, magical names, kids get their phantasy going, they become enthusiastic and forget they are eating veggies. Every five-year old wants to taste troll soup.

Enthusiasm and phantasy as a simple, likeable way to help parents to feed their kids veggies.

We asked kids what certain veggies made them think of, what they looked like to them. And we used 12 of the coolest names they invented to rename 12 veggies.

Carrots become orange rockets

Oyster mushrooms become gnome trumpets

Belgian andives become dragon teeth

Green beans become frog ski’s

Eggplants become Cherokee canoes

Zucchini become troll bats

Cherry tomatoes become clown’s noses

Peppers become treasure boxes

New potatoes become small meteorites

Those names were put on new packs, which replaced the ‘normal’ veggies in all 900 Delhaize stores across Belgium. The Magic Veggies were all over the fresh department.

A press release was sent out in which the Magic veggies were positioned as a proofpoint of Delhaize’s ambition to help people to eat better.

Belgium loved it, both the people and the media. We aired through national radio, OOH and print, supported by a strong digital and social campaign.

TV, radio, newspapers, online: everybody talked about Magic Veggies, unanimously positive about the fact that a supermarket was actually trying to help people with a real live problem, in an unpretentious and likeable way.

Not just news media reported about it, the Magic Veggies were also spoofed in the popular talk show De Ideale Wereld and the biggest quality newspaper De Standaard spontaneously published a quiz about the Magic Veggies’ names.

Generated advertising value of the launch was estimated at 123K€, generated editorial value at 247K€.

We had a 151% sales increase for the renamed vegetables and sold 2 million Magic Veggies in 2 weeks.

Our social media campaign generated a 2% conversion rate to the campaign platform with a benchmark of 0,31%.

Quite a lot for a Belgian retailer.