Anchor Food Professionals
Celebrating 25 years by revealing the tricks of the trade.
Proud to be a Chef is Australia’s leading culinary mentoring program for up-and-coming chefs. Since its inception in 1996, the fast-paced, four-day program has welcomed nearly 700 apprentices through its doors, including past winner turned mentor, Chef George Calombaris.
For its milestone 25th year, Proud to be a Chef wanted a fresh campaign to entice apprentice chefs. So we developed Tricks of the Trade Revealed, a campaign approach that utilised vibrant visual devices to reveal invaluable culinary tips from past mentors, chefs and finalists.
The plate became a core motif in our design. More than just a vessel, the plate was deeper than that; it was a blank canvas for chefs to realise their potential. We developed this further, using the plate as a device to ‘reveal’, which worked at every stage of the multiple phased digital-led campaign – from the initial application push where we used the plates to hide and then reveal our main mentors, to social posts housing quotes or advice, to the cook off dish presentations. The plate was something that connected our finalists to the program at every journey revealing something new and inspiring.
Another key component of the campaign was the primary font, Infamous Regular, meant to replicate the handwritten nature of food orders sent to kitchens. Additionally, the butter yellow ‘highlight’ was used to add a vibrant punch and tie back to Fonterra’s dairy heritage. No detail was too small.
Social media was a big component for the campaign so our team concepted, photographed, filmed and produced content to cater to the different phases. From teaser reels of the mentors, to hype films, to mentor reveals, to call-to-actions and much-sought-after recipe advice, we captured it all and used it strategically throughout our campaign in order to entice and ultimately inspire up-and-coming chefs to apply for the upcoming program.
Overall, this digital-led social campaign was their most successful campaign to date. It resulted in over 1.4 million impressions, over 160k video views, over 400k social post engagement, and reached over 200k people, smashing all targets. The campaign generated an impressive 679 leads more than double the target of 270.
Thanks to the success of the campaign, the real difficulty for the Proud to be a Chef team was selecting the 32 finalists from the unprecedented amount of high calibre applications from across Australia.
