Dive Brief:
- HelloFresh this week launched a live cooking competition show on Twitch, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon. The six-episode “Unleash the Feast” offers viewers a chance to win prizes and to receive discounts and free shipping on HelloFresh meal kits, according to an announcement.
- Esports commentators Soe Gschwind and Guy Blaze host the show, which features Chef Tricia Wang as the Feast Master who guides contestants throughout the competition. Each 75-minute episode features three popular streamers competing in a series of head-to-head cooking tasks, with the goal of preparing a HelloFresh meal.
- Viewers of the livestream can participate in the action by posting comments into Twitch’s on-screen feed and casting votes for their favorite dishes. The series livestreams on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. ET, with the first three episodes running through July 5 and the last three episodes running weekly August 16-30, per the announcement.
Dive Insight:
HelloFresh’s sponsorship of a livestreamed cooking competition show is a chance to demonstrate how its meal kits can help novices in the kitchen. “Unleash the Feast” aims to amp up the drama with trivia, technical and physical challenges that grant the competing streamers the ability to thwart each other’s cooking tools and strategies. HelloFresh is offering incentives for viewers to try out its meal kits at home, including $120 off and free shipping for using the order code FEAST16.
Twitch offers HelloFresh a platform to showcase its brand in an exclusive livestream, giving the meal-kit company more creative freedom with lower production costs than a show for network television. In addition, the brand can reach younger consumers who spend less time with traditional broadcast and cable TV as they stream video to connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones. Twitch last year averaged 31 million daily visitors, 75% of whom were in the 16 to 34 age group, according to its audience data. That potential reach is enticing to brands like HelloFresh that seek to raise awareness among consumers who are setting up their own households or who influence the purchase decisions of their parents.
HelloFresh’s livestreamed show comes as the company seeks to build on its recent momentum as many consumers work from home and go into the office less often than they did before the pandemic. The company’s active customers in the U.S. grew 15% from a year earlier to 4.25 million in the first quarter of 2022, while orders expanded 16% to 17.4 million, according to its quarterly report. Its U.S. revenue jumped 37% to 1.1 billion euros, though inflation eroded those gains in real terms.
HelloFresh’s past video efforts have included a cooking show starring actor and comedian Mindy Kaling. Amid the travails of the pandemic, the four-part series showed how HelloFresh’s meal kits could help to relieve some of the stresses associated with going to the grocery store. HelloFresh distributed the program on its digital and social media channels. Its cooking series on Twitch adds another dimension to its programming efforts with a livestream that adds a greater sense of immediacy, similar to other live programming like sports and news.
