Consumers these days are more conscious about food provenance: where it comes from, what it’s made with, and what goes into its creation. That’s no different in the snack aisle than the produce aisle: they buy more than just a product, and they look to support products made in/by local communities. Unbeknownst to most, the ubiquitous yellow Lay’s bags found in every grocery aisle are filled with chips grown and made in local communities across America—more than 100 of them, to be precise—and Lay’s felt the world deserved to know. But with 42% of people not believing Lay’s are made with real ingredients, and 34% not even believing Lay’s potatoes come from real farms, it was our mission to change the narrative. Enter Golden Grows Here: an initiative to introduce Lay’s proprietary, sustainably sourced potatoes and shed light on the farms that cultivate them.

To launch the campaign, we took two dynamic paths. At Coachella, a cultural hotbed of innovation and experimentation, we debuted a first-of-its-kind consumer experience around Potadomes: highly immersive, musically-themed spaces that offered festival goers a chance to try an elevated, tasting menu featuring chips made fresh onsite; explore scratch-n-sniff nosing displays; snap photos on a solid gold tractor and see Lay’s in a whole new way. On TV, we encapsulated the spirit of the campaign with a hilariously tongue-in-cheek spot that connected Lay’s potato story, as told by a miniature-flag-pinning spokeswoman, to a real farmer on a real farm, watching one of those miniature flags manifest as an enormous extraterrestrial monolith careening toward his fields. The takeaway: Lay’s farms (and the farmers who run them) are an inextricable piece of our brand, and the superior quality of our chips is owed heavily to their passion. Sounds pretty fresh, right?