A MARKET GONE STALE

In 2019, seven out of 10 hamburgers and nine out of 10 hotdogs consumed in Mexico were made with Bimbo buns, with street food vendors (dubbed “Special Channels”) representing 33% of the company’s total sales. But as macroeconomic pressures and fast food competition intensified post-COVID, that percentage fell by 8% – resulting in an annual deficit of $192M USD for the company.

BRIEF: HELP BIMBO CUSTOMERS SELL MORE STREET FOOD

How could Bimbo help its commercial allies increase sales, while strengthening brand awareness among both food vendors and end consumers alike?

OBJECTIVES

1. Increase visibility and drive traffic to street food carts, shops, and stalls across Mexico.

2. Recover 10% of sales participation in Special Channels.

THE GREATEST GUIDE

The world’s first fully generative search and signage system designed to put 8,402 of Mexico’s most creative hamburger and hotdog stands on the map.

CREATIVE FOOD DESERVES CREATIVE DATA

From octopus to grasshopper, the creativity of Mexico’s street food is staggering. It’s also highly diverse, with each of these 8,402 stands selling unique and local recipes. Our data collection and application of it to mapping and generative AI reflects the variance and creativity of the food, while respecting a rich, traditional visual language. The food isn’t generic – neither is our technology solution.

THE NOT-SO-SECRET SAUCE

To drive word on the street, we turned to 18 earned television appearances, radio coverage, foodie influencers and +340 social media posts, and digital ads to get people exploring local food vendors via the Google Maps API-powered website.

BRAND RELEVANCE

Bimbo has supplied buns to millions of food vendors for more than 78 years, building trust and loyalty with its clients. To support their culinary endeavors, we saw an opportunity to give them exposure and attract their target audience, unlocking the power of big tech for small business.

AUTOMATED ART DIRECTION

To produce 8,402 data-driven point-of-sale posters we combined Mexico’s rich tradition of sign painting with the scale and efficiency of artificial intelligence – we built up an innovative, iterative workflow between human art directors and our AI models. Rather than bespoke art direction, our approach was rules-based (e.g., the rule of thirds), which we rolled up into a programmatic creative system. For example, our automated drop shadow had to work for both long, wide hotdogs, and narrow, high hamburgers.

GENERATIVE STACK

OpenAI CLIP – image-to-text, to create prompts from selected images

OpenAI Dall-E2 – text-to-image to produce base food paintings, backgrounds

RmBGAI – for automated close cropping

Pillow – Python for compositing (essentially programmatic Photoshop)

Wand – Python bindings for ImageMagick, for compositing

Stability AI – upscale API, for increasing resolution to poster-size print specs

PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCTION DESIGN VIA PYTHON

Drop shadow

Vignetting layer

Rough border layer

High-pass sharpening filter

Scanned, hand painted-type

SCALE

National, with 8,402 hotdog and burger carts served across Mexico’s 31 states.

OUTPUT

We created a world-first workflow designed to turn data into prompts and prompts into food paintings, all are masked and combined with generative backgrounds. Dynamically typeset from hand-painted fonts, automatically retouched and branded, then ingested into our system as separate layers. Ultimately, we generated 42,010 unique point-of-sale materials for Bimbo’s small business customers – five versions for each vendor, all combined, up-resized and output to final specs – they received via WhatsApp ready to print.

SMALL BUSINESS, BIG IMPORTANCE

In Mexico, a country of more than 123M people, the informal food sector is an integral part of the economy and culture. According to INEGI, more than 2.5M people are involved in informal commerce, including selling food on the streets. This sector represents approximately 30% of the country’s GDP and generates indirect employment through a sustainable business model, contributing significantly to the national economy.

HERITAGE & GRAPHIC DESIGN

The visual culture of Mexico’s hand-painted signs has endured over generations and across regions, playing a critical role in helping small businesses promote themselves. When using technology to create marketing materials for our partners, we let tradition dictate – we used the same graphic codes that jocheros and hamburgueseros already know and feel comfortable using to give thousands of stands and locations their unique visual identity.