Live marketing and food services: oh, what a great combination.

Life and communication are increasingly digital, and that’s cool, it’s great, it’s a success… but when the subject is important, it needs to be live. Proposals, marriage, farewells, divorces… for all of these, an audio message on WhatsApp won’t do. It needs to be in person. Isn’t that right?

Here’s another point: have you noticed that practically everything that has a reason to be done in person, like celebrating, reuniting or marking a milestone in our lives, involves food? Happy hour, birthdays, weddings, baby showers, romantic dinners, pizza with friends, I’ve even seen it at wakes: we’re always snacking on something together. Even if it’s cold coffee and a stale cookie.

In short: if it’s important, it’s live. And if it’s important and live, there’s almost certainly food involved.

But I’m not here to talk about stale cookies. I’m here to talk about POTATO FRIES. I came to talk about the Batatalhas campaign we did for Farm Frites.

From a pun to a delightful concept

I don’t know if you all know, but we manage the social media communication for Farm Frites in Brazil and Latin America. And Farm, as we call it around here, is a Dutch company that sells various types of potato cuts for restaurants and burger joints to fry and serve. We love it because it generates a lot of great ideas, memes, and puns with little potatoes.

I don’t know how it happened, but on a normal day, while calmly creating posts for Farm Frites, Brenão, our copywriter here at Fome, came up out of nowhere with a pun that was as infamous as it was brilliant. Batatalhas.

As with the best ideas, it came without a briefing, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We laughed a lot and kept it to ourselves. However, someone on the team really took it seriously and told Pati, our client at Farm. Obviously, she loved it, and the first thing she did was to patent the name. Why? She didn’t know yet either.

Here’s the translation:

—

From concept to a super cool action

Obviously, the name suggested a competition… but about what? Against whom?

It was only a matter of time before an opportunity arose. Farm Frites needed to “heat up” (get it? get it??) the sales of the Mini Waffle, a rather unique potato format that needed a little push for restaurants to explore its culinary possibilities.

And suddenly, the potato, which is the ultimate symbol of peace (it pleases Greeks, Trojans, vegans, gluten-free folks, or anyone who prefers potatoes to studying), became the star of a true war—friendly and without casualties—between chefs and owners of food service businesses.

The spark for this historic dispute? To award which participant could create the most delicious, crispy, and unusual fried potato recipe using Mini Waffles.

The participants? On one side, various restaurants that are already Farm clients and know (or want to know) about the unique little potato. On the other side, Farm distributors and the chosen judges—there was even a participant from Masterchef—who would decide who would emerge victorious, winning a fantastic trip to visit the company’s headquarters in the Netherlands!

But, for me, the biggest winner was… me! Or rather, the entire agency in this experience.

Living in the trenches of always-on

Imagine being paid to travel around São Paulo and eat delicious fried potatoes, accompanied by amazing burgers (that’s right, in that order) for about ten days? All of this for breakfast, lunch, and sometimes even dinner? I did. I, the client, the judges, and the team from Fome—whose name was quite fitting.

As a good combatant (and overseeing all the fieldwork, since Brenão lives in Anápolis – GO), I was ready for this terrible sacrifice.

All of this happened during the filming of the restaurants, the testimonials from the participants, and of course, the surprising recipes created by the chefs to delight the judges—and us too. Later, the footage would be broken down, edited, and served in generous portions (got that??) on the social media of the participants and Farm itself.

Our first stage of capturing and posting was done to introduce the participants and their stories, and the second stage was to showcase each restaurant’s recipe to surprise the judges. Below, you can check out some of the productions.

But what was happening “out there,” live and in person, was truly the main course of the action: all the relationships, the competition, and the enormous amount of staff we coordinated together, including the van driver, formed such an organized and efficient connection that it still warms our hearts today.

From start to finish, the results were epic:

We witnessed moving stories of overcoming obstacles, new and funny people, many (really many) moments of anxiety, but also of laughter and recording errors that became inside jokes.

And the main thing: for two months, we witnessed what an incredible concept, a well-coordinated execution and a sensational product in the hands of highly creative chefs are capable of doing. There was preparation with seafood, with all types of meat, a sweet potato fries recipe presented as if by magic, in short, a dozen absurdly tasty combinations.

The winner? Everyone: the participant with the best recipe, all the restaurants that had enormous visibility, Farm, which grew a lot on the networks, the distributors that sold the most potatoes, and the market in general that was inspired to create new successful recipes for sale!

Now, Fome team, final message: it’s time to find a pizza client, another for Japanese food, and another for Mexican food… let’s go? 🤤