Uber Eats is an established player in the food delivery service, known for working with America’s favorite celebrities. From duo Lil Nas X and Elton John, to icons Jennifer Coolidge and Julia Fox, Uber Eats regularly employs cultural groundbreakers in its advertising.

It was no longer enough for Uber Eats to just create cultural moments in commercials. As a delivery service, we show up on people’s doorsteps daily. So we looked to partner with Warner Bros. Discovery to actually create and deliver cultural moments ourselves.

And there’s no better way to do that than the holidays. Known to be the busiest, most chaotic, and financially stressful time of year, it gave us the opportunity to provide something exciting yet convenient.

While every household celebrates the holidays differently, there is one tradition shared across cultures: re-watching the fan-favorite Harry Potter movies.

No matter who you are or how you celebrate the holidays, everyone loves Harry Potter. So we figured why not use the power of Uber Eats delivery to celebrate the magic of Hogwarts, bringing trunks to doorsteps across America?

And what better way to do that than to take the tradition of building gingerbread houses and reinvent it as an Augmented Reality Harry Potter experience. So we partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products to bring the magic of this Wizarding World to life.

The target audience was delivery customers with minimal loyalty to any one app. They tend to be families with young kids and their relationship to the category is transactional - they use whichever app offers the best promo.

We saw an opportunity to increase loyalty by creating an experience that transcended the transactional one they expect from delivery apps. How could we be more than just the service that handed off their food?

So we built a deeply engaging mobile experience, leveraging an IP partner that our audience knows and loves: Harry Potter. We went far beyond a simple order, instead becoming a source of entertainment for families.

Because this activation was designed for families and their children, we worked carefully to adhere to privacy standards and gathered no data on participants.

The experience centered around a gingerbread kit inspired by Hogwarts castle. Families could build the castle–then bring it to life through digital games and unlockable enhancements. Every element was crafted to feel as real to Hogwarts as possible, while providing a delicious snack to boot.

We partnered closely with one of the UK’s most established cookie producers, along with augmented reality gaming experts, to create a kit that weaves together technology and tradition.

Complete with premium gingerbread and edible decorations, machine learning turned hand-decorated cookies turned into markers unlocking AR games, letting fans race a flying Ford Anglia and toss quaffles across the sky above their castles. The big finale: reciting a spell aloud lights up multi-colored LEDs around the castle.

All packaged in a trunk inspired by the Wizarding World, we produced over 5K trunks distributed across 18 cities in the US and Canada.

As a limited edition offering, the trunks created so much fan fervor that the experience temporarily broke the Uber Eats app, as some cities sold out in as little as 5 minutes. Trunks appeared on eBay within hours of release, with prices up to 7 times the original sale price.

As soon as fans got their hands on the trunks, they immediately posted on social about their experiences, uploading detailed and excited unboxings, gingerbread decorating videos, and footage of them playing the AR games — all providing a valuable and coveted experience to fans.

With the exclusive Wizarding World holiday trunk, Uber Eats showed that they don’t only know culture, they deliver it too.