Midwest Dairy continuously explores ways to drive dairy sales through online recipe promotions. Research shows that 88 percent of consumers use online recipes, with 17 percent of those consumers using them daily. Targeting online shoppers with these recipes presents an opportunity, as 53 percent of consumers admit to adding items to their online shopping cart after seeing an online recipe. Midwest Dairy uses recipe promotions to reach consumers looking for nutritious recipes to make their family and to inspire these consumers to use the dairy products they love in innovative ways in the kitchen. Also, once a new recipe is tried and enjoyed by the family, odds are it will be repeated for future meals, boosting consumption of dairy!
To inspire shoppers to make dairy-centric recipes, Midwest Dairy partnered with Chicory, an e-commerce advertising platform known for transforming recipe content into commerce media. Checkoff worked with them to tie dairy messaging with recipes featuring or pairing well with dairy products. During the back-to-school season, Midwest Dairy partnered with Chicory to drive sales of dairy products, specifically milk, cheese, and yogurt. Dairy messaging appeared in recipes featuring dairy as ingredients, for example, weeknight dinner planning and healthy snacks for kids. As consumers skimmed online recipes, they saw ads targeting key ingredients and encouraged them to add the featured dairy ingredients to their online cart to make the dish. These ads also highlighted dairy’s nutritional value, specifically its great protein source, and followed the tagline “Parent Approved.”
This campaign was originally set to run from September 1, 2023, to September 25, 2023, but it was extended through October 22, 2023, due to positive results. Consumer engagement with these recipes exceeded the usual performance of campaigns like this through Chicory. Both the click-through rate, indicating interest, and the add-to-cart, indicating purchase intent, performed well. During this period, this campaign drove 12,733,902 impressions, resulting in almost 4.8 million incremental dairy items going through the register. This campaign strategically ran at the same time as other retailer activations in the Midwest Dairy region to increase the impact on overall dairy sales.
Midwest Dairy partnered again with Chicory during the holiday season. The holiday campaign successfully drove almost 10 million impressions and resulted in over three million incremental units across key dairy categories. Notably, cream and butter saw the greatest lift in sales, and the recipes that saw a high level of engagement included Pecan Cream Pie and Taco Casserole. This campaign strategically also ran at the same time as other retailer activations in the Midwest Dairy region to increase the impact on overall dairy sales.
