In Canada, the online grocery and food delivery space is growing dramatically.

Voilà is a relatively new grocery delivery service. Despite having fresher offerings and more efficient delivery, it was hard to stand out against established competitors and other new market entrants amongst our millennial target.

Other online delivery services, such as Walmart, have a head start and larger geographical distribution. In addition to major grocery retailers that deliver, like Metro and Loblaws, we’re also competing against third party services like Instacart or UberEats and meal kit delivery services.

Voilà is only available in select urban areas. With a ‘fresh or it’s free’ guarantee and strong Net Promoter Scores, we found that people who tried the service tended to love it -- so we just needed more people to try it.

We needed a game-changing way to get noticed and drive leads as a challenger brand.

When a recipe goes viral on TikTok, ingredients sell out quickly in stores. Whether it’s #WhippedCoffee, #CloudBread, or #FetaPasta, this phenomenon has caused grocery retailers to sell out of key ingredients and has more than doubled Instacart orders.

This was a perfect untapped opportunity for our grocery delivery service Voilà. If we could predict recipe trends before they took off and partner with foodie content creators to capitalize on the opportunity, we would be able to intercept cultural moments in a way no competitors in Canada had, and acquire new customers with a first-mover advantage.

What if we could make trending recipe TikToks shoppable?

By using Spark Ads and partnering with foodie creators, we could take users from the TikTok (or Instagram/Facebook) video to a pre-populated cart on Voilà.ca in just one click and drastically shorten the ecommerce path-to-purchase.

A tool to measure food trends didn’t exist, so we built one. Our proprietary, custom-built Trend Index ingests data from TikTok trends, Google insights, Pinterest trends, social listening, culture and content trends, and even Voilà’s first-party search and sales data. These data points are assigned a value based on influence and filtered through our index to generate “trend energy” predictions.

With this data-informed scoring, we partnered with #FoodTok creators to rapidly develop recipes. These TikTok videos drove to pre-populated pages on the Voilà website where shoppers could purchase all required ingredients for delivery.

We targeted Voilà’s key growth audience: tech-savvy Millennials (and older Gen Z) in metro areas who were likely to use an existing delivery service but may not have heard of Voilà. We served them recipe videos based on their content interests making it easy to try recipes they had already been salivating over.

A tool to measure food trends didn’t exist, so we built one. Our proprietary, custom-built Trend Index ingests data from TikTok trends, Google insights, Pinterest trends, social listening, culture and content trends, and Voilà’s first-party search and sales data. Each data source is assigned a value based on its level of influence. These data points are filtered through our index to generate “trend energy” predictions.

With our custom-built Trend Index as a silver bullet, we were ready to bring trending recipes to consumers’ tables.

We partnered with #FoodTok creators, and applied a Spark Ads media buy accompanied by a Pop-out Showcase add-on (a first in Canada) to trending TikTok recipes, to make them shoppable. With just one click, customers were taken directly to pre-populated ingredients pages on the Voilà website, where shoppers could purchase all required ingredients for delivery, drastically shortening the path-to-purchase.

To keep shoppers engaged, as soon as their orders were delivered, our CRM system triggered a follow-up email with the recipe and video. Further amplification on additional social platforms like Instagram and Facebook drove additional views, click-throughs, and ultimately sign-ups and orders.

By activating on trends as they hit critical mass, our collaborative creative and data-driven approach was able to tap into TikTok’s #MadeMeBuyIt behaviour and make Voilà the first grocery delivery brand to tap into viral commerce on the social media platform in this way.

Typically it takes consumers multiple touchpoints before they’re ready to buy. We flipped that on its head and collapsed the funnel into a single touchpoint and successfully drove results.

A social-first campaign from inception to execution, Trending 2 Table successfully turned social media trends into trials and drastically shortened the path-to-purchase.

By taking a thoughtful, insights-driven approach using social data, we were able to drive both new orders and acquisitions with our paid social content and smartly compete with more established competitors.

8x increase in Voilà orders

11x increase in new Voilà customers

Drove 60-80 new users per week (benchmark average of other Voilà ads was 5-7 new users per week)

200%+ higher clickthrough rate

Over 3.5 million views

More than 40K engagements

Trending 2 Table has been a great conversion-driver for Voilà. It eliminated the friction between first exposure to a trending recipe and getting it onto your plate and allowed us to turn complex data into dinners, “Just Like That.”

TikTok Canada refers to Trending 2 Table as “The Ultimate #FoodTok experience.”