Serious efforts for serious kitchens
HKScan Foodservice is Sweden’s largest company in meat and charcuterie. Their target market is restaurants and large-scale catering kitchens in both the private and public sectors, through wholesalers. One of HKScan Foodservice’ greatest challenges is to get through to the end-customer via wholesalers and their own sales force, with many different brands, in a world in which the end-customers do not know where the food on their plates comes from. Since the target group can vary from small local taverns and bistros to schools and hospitals, it is essential that we tailor the communication to suit each customer. We give some examples below of the distinctive approaches we took to ensure that more people would be aware of HKScan Foodservice as a supplier.
100kilos of love
Grisakademin
[The Pork Academy]
To enhance the standing of pork, which has not received its due for too long, Scan wanted to highlight pork as the easy to cook, nutritious, tasty and flexible food that it is. The approach chosen was to create a training course for purchasers and wholesalers, in which they would learn how Scan cherishes the animals, how Swedish pork products differ from foreign ones and how Scan’s unique products, Piggham and Svensk Rapsgris, offer exceptionally fine cuts, which quality restaurants really appreciate. The result was Grisakademin. Here, participants meet up and benefit from an educational evening which includies a porkfest and a digital pork quiz, where the prize is the golden curly tail statuette.
The suet feeder
The primary focus of one of HK Scan Foodservice’s brands, Scan, is to ensure the highest standards of welfare for the animals, and to make full use of every part of the animal. In line with this ambition, they wanted to find an unusual and creative way to promote their product, suet. If you ask most people directly, they associate suet with the balls that people hang up in trees during the winter to feed the hungry birds. So that’s what we decided to play on in our creative solution, using it in a direct mail campaign aimed at restaurants and wholesalers.
A slightly different take on Christmas
Christmas is a major food feast, a time when every supplier, whether grocery store or food service, is under real pressure of space on shelves and on the Christmas table. It is essential to stand out and be seen, since this is the peak sales period for many food companies. HKScan Foodservice wanted help in promoting the true Swedish Christmas classics, the Christmas ham, Christmas sausages, meatballs etc., yet they also wanted to highlight the less traditional cuts for Christmas, and so broaden their Christmas offer.
Jointly with Johan Åkerberg, of the food studio, Måltid, we launched an elegant Christmas table, with a smoked food theme, a taste trend which has become increasingly popular and attractive to customers. So that it stood out from the flood of Christmas A4 folders, and simply to take more of a fun approach to inspiring restaurateurs to experiment with new tastes and less common cuts, we decided to provide recipe inspiration in an Advent Calendar. Under each daily flap, there is an exciting and modern recipe to grace the Christmas table.
