Frito-Lay has long been the purveyor of some of the world’s favorite snack foods, but their space has historically been in the chip aisle. To generate buzz for Mac N’ Cheetos (their latest offering, a mash-up of frozen macaroni and cheese nuggets coated in that delicious orange Cheeto powder) among food influencers, their PR Agency, Ketchum, turned to UviaUs to create the ultimate unboxing experience.

Since the audience we needed to reach wouldn’t typically be running to the freezer aisle, our team worked to create something that would be so impossible to ignore. Our team engineered, designed, and sourced the mother of all buzz generation press kits.

Each kit of these massive kits contained everything needed to enjoy the snack, including a fully branded toaster oven, two packages of Mac n’ Cheetos packed in dry ice, a branded cooler bag, and a dedicated video player loaded with cooking instructions that did double duty as a timer for the toaster oven, all inside a custom, fully-branded insulated box. Even the toaster ovens were finished with custom Chester Cheeto graphics.

To add an additional layer of interactivity and nostalgia, our team created a 16bit animated video based on the 1992 SNES game Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool. The video contained both the cooking instructions for the Mac N’ Cheetos as well as an animated timer. The video was included in the kit on a purpose-built tent-stand video player.

The 50 kits sent out generated posts from 30 unique influencers, with a total of over 1.3 million impressions on social media, including over 40,000 interactions and 8000 shares, validating the decision to generate buzz organically rather than paid influencers and celebrity spokespersons. A major win for the campaign was scoring a featured post by Vice Magazine’s food blog, Munchies, a channel normally dedicated to finer dining and up-and-coming stars in the culinary space.