Toronto has experienced the longest pandemic lockdown of any city in the world. As of writing this, its ban on indoor dining is at day 314. As a result, every restaurant is struggling, with overall category sales being down 16% and a recent survey even showing that over 50% of owners believed they would go out of business by fall. With that, Good Fortune’s objective was to boost delivery sales and, simply put, stay alive. This all became even more challenging as every restaurant in the city flooded the mobile ordering apps, which themselves had become increasingly popular and relevant in our new and unprecedented anti-dine-out, isolated lives. It was a situation no brand and nobody had ever experience before. With all that, we needed to standout in a way that connected to, and extended from, this very unique situation we’re all in… with a $0 budget.

Our insight was twofold. First up, for the first time ever, millions of people were WFH, making home offices, and expensing items to work. Next we realized that online ordering apps had very rapidly become woven into our lives. And within this space, every restaurant was using the apps the exact same way. Our targeted response to this real-time shift in our world and our business was Receats, a sneaky way to expense your eats by implementing the simplest of mobile hacks. We renamed Good Fortune’s entire menu on Uber Eats and DoorDash as office supplies, giving people the option to expense food to work. An additional element of the idea was the fun/cheeky/potentially unethical aspect of it. We knew that if the idea could spark some form of debate (“this is awesome” vs. “this is illegal”), we could amplify our message and (non-existent) budget across social media.

Food ordering apps had become the most important mobile ecommerce technology within our new business model. They were how we got in front of potential customers, and we needed to find a way to stand out. Our competitors were all using this technology in the exact same way: the way it was designed to be used. We needed an innovative idea to hack these delivery platforms, and in a way that would resonate with people throughout the real-time cultural changes. Our research showed that record numbers of our target audience was now working from home and creating home offices. Encouraging people to expense our disguised menu allowed us to achieve our final goal: to spark some (mostly fun) debate around the campaign. By building some tension and potential controversy into the idea, we were able to gain much more traction and real-time responses across social media.

To bring Receats to life, we went right to the place people were going more so than ever before (the literal menus of Uber Eats and DoorDash) to give them the things they needed more than ever (supplies for their new home office) and renamed every single item on Good Fortune’s menu as popular office supplies. These supplies were selected to be believable in both price and purpose; burgers became Basic Steel Staplers, chicken sandwiches became Dry Erase Whiteboards etc... We knew people’s expenses would require paper trails, so we rejigged the receipt printing process to deliver customers real receipts for their ‘office items’ that came from GF Office Supply Co., a fictional identity we created for this execution. Beyond sneakily changing the menus, the only thing we did to promote the somewhat unethical execution was organically post on Instagram; introducing and explaining the idea to our existing followers.

Receats quickly blew up and had over 300 articles written about it in at least 16 countries, accounting for an estimated 570m+ media impressions. The campaign also stirred endless threads of love, laughs and ethical debates on various social platforms. It received over 150k upvotes on Reddit, rising to the top of the r/funny subreddit (the second most popular subreddit of all with over 34m subscribers). It trended on LinkedIn and would end up featured on LinkedIn News. It went wild on TikTok with individual posts earning over 30k likes and it took off on Twitter, earning over $225,000 worth of engagement on that one platform alone. It was even used as a business case at Canada’s top business school (Ivey). And,most importantly, this mobile-driven response to shifting behaviors and trends drove a 34% increase in mobile sales for the restaurant, allowing them to not only survive, but also thrive.