During the pandemic the QR code re-emerged to help businesses that needed a way to communicate in a suddenly touchless society.

This campaign took that technology and utilised it for Ocado (the world’s largest dedicated online supermarket) to overcome the age-old issue of having to add each individual ingredient of a recipe to your shopping basket.

For the first time in publishing history, The Guardian made all of its food content shoppable via QR codes so all of a recipe’s ingredients could be added directly into Ocado shopping baskets solving consumer need via new technology to drive business growth.

Over the past few years Ocado has relied on direct response vouchers and the pandemic’s impact on ecommerce to drive growth. But as lockdowns eased, category growth in online supermarket shopping began to level off and high top of mind awareness wasn’t translating into consideration or new customers.

The challenge was to stimulate incremental growth by convincing shoppers using other supermarkets to switch to Ocado but with a media budget a fraction of the size of the competition.

The first thing we did was work to understand the motivations for becoming an Ocado customer and found that the biggest factor was having the largest range and offering more choice than any other supermarket.

We also tried to understand how people’s relationship with eating at home had changed during lockdown and found that we had become a nation of cooks with 9 in 10 people saying they looked forward to cooking more from scratch.

But 8 in 10 people also said that convenience while shopping was more important than ever. Cooking a recipe from scratch involved collecting all of the individual ingredients click by click or by walking around a supermarket with a list.

How could we bring together Ocado’s range and choice, the rise in cooking from scratch and the need for greater convenience as part of the shopping experience?

The answer lay with the QR code. During the pandemic they had re-emerged to help businesses that needed a way to communicate in a suddenly touchless society with 83% of people using a QR code for the first time.

The Guardian’s Feast Magazine inspires people to cook fresh, modern cuisine with a brilliantly diverse selection of ingredients .

For the first time in publishing history, the Guardian made all Feast content shoppable via QR codes to create a truly innovative fully shoppable recipe magazine.

For each recipe, Guardian readers could add ingredients directly into their Ocado shopping baskets - enhancing reader experience and building fame. With 15 weekly recipes from star chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha and Thomasina Miers, Ocado taps into the Guardian’s credibility and extends their diversity of range message - with Guardian recipes also appearing in a dedicated section on Ocado.com.

Throughout the year, Ocado owns all the advertising inventory in Feast - both in print and online, providing 100% share of voice. It delivers unprecedented brand presence, baked into a premium editorial product. In addition, content features from best-selling author Rukmini Iyer extend the depth of Ocado’s range and seasonality, as do bespoke video recipes.

The collaboration also extended food coverage into the audio space with a brand new Ocado-supported weekly podcast - Comfort Eating with Grace Dent. Celebrity guests such as Stephen Fry, Mae Martin and Russell T Davies spill the beans on the food they really eat in their most meaningful moments.

This is a partnership built on unprecedented commitment to detail to deliver a seamless experience for readers, Ocado and the Guardian: 15 recipes with individual QR codes linked to thousands of individual ingredient SKUs for 52 weeks with every single recipe measurable, every single week.

Between mid-2019 and July 2021, as the fastest growing supermarket, the past 2 years has seen substantial growth, increasing market share by 40% - now representing 1.8% of the total UK grocery market.

Our partnership is delivering incremental customer growth to date 89% of visits to the product pages have come from non-Ocado customers, and a conversion rate to purchase of 3%.

The Comfort Eating podcast has been a huge success, immediately reaching No 1 in the iTunes charts.

62% of all campaign recallers said the advertising has improved their opinion about Ocado and they have been inspired to make one of the recipes featured in the campaign.

Not only did Ocado outperform versus other rival supermarkets but Ocado increased the value of its brand by 72% in the last 12 months (well beyond the 22% average growth seen by Kantar’s Top 75 Brandz) and is now valued at $5,681m.