Hovering at a 3.4% market share, Pringles is far behind leaders like Lay’s (12.6% share) in the salty snack category. And with its significantly smaller budgets, Pringles must cut through in unexpected, cost-efficient ways to drive awareness. In the category, brands consistently launch new, special edition flavors to gain market share. Pringles are no exception. But these special-edition flavors are now so common in the category that they’ve become a trope and breaking through with these can be tough. So, our objective was to design a completely new kind of special edition flavor. One that would generate a new kind of buzz and help Pringles stand out in the category. In this instance, with less than $50,000, we designed and launched a Pringles flavor that has no flavor. A Pringles package that doesn’t technically exist. And with just 50 of these, we got largescale nationwide news coverage.

Pringles prides itself on designing and launching special edition flavors that react to what the world wants. (Recent examples include Moa Burger Pringles for the upcoming launch of new Halo, Pickle Rick Pringles for the launch of Rick & Morty Season 4, Turducken Pringles for Thanksgiving). In March of 2021, the whole world seemed to want NFTs. So, we gave the people what they wanted. We designed and launched CryptoCrisp. A special-edition, virtual-only Pringles flavor exclusively available as an NFT. A Pringles flavor that has no flavor, that no-one will ever taste, that doesn’t even technically exist. Designed by digital artist Vasya Kolotusha, only 50 CryptoCrisps were made available. Directly targeting the enormous Crypto trading community, Cryptocrisp was sold on the Ethereum-based asset auction site, Rarible. All of this got the world’s attention and got our humble potato chip into the enormously popular crypto conversation.

With the skills of digital artist, Vasya Kolotusha, we designed CryptoCrisp: The first-ever virtual-only Pringles flavor, exclusively available as an NFT. As a respected NFT artist, Vasya’s design of the CryptoCrisp gave it credibility in the NFT art auction space. We launched CryptoCrisp on the Ethereum-based digital art auction site, Rarible. And only 50 of these special edition packs were made available. Within an hour, all 50 sold out. Then (as with any legitimate digital art) a bidding war began on the site, with owners reselling their CryptoCrisps for over $4500. The CryptoCrisp itself was a simple, shiny gold Pringles tube that featured Ethereum-style coins designed onto it, in the place where a normal Pringles tube would showcase the chips. Multiple iterations of the CryptoCrisp were crafted before landing on this final design, which is true to both Vasya’s artistic style and Pringles’ iconic design assets.

All 50 CryptoCrisps sold out within an hour. Originally listed for $2, owners resold theirs for over $4500. CryptoCrisp was picked up by major news, business, trend and food titles including: Food & Wine Magazine, HypeBeast, Design Taxi, Trend Hunter, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, San Francisco Chronical, Inc. Magazine etc. This generated 96 million earned impressions within the first 24-hours and brought Pringles into cutting-edge cultural conversations it had never been part of before. The CryptoCrisp launch post has the most engagement of any social post on Pringles’ feed this year – with over 20 times more engagement than average. And while it is too early to correlate these stats with an increase in sales of real-life Pringles, the above data shows that we easily met our objective of creating a unique, special edition pack that broke through and drove brand awareness within a sea of competitor special edition.