A century of popcorn, and no one knew the name

Launch PR for G.H. Cretors, the first consumer-facing brand for Cornfields, Inc., anchored by the caramel-and-cheddar Chicago Mix.

Cornfields had spent decades making popcorn for other companies. Contract manufacturing is a business with no public face, and it had left them with everything except the one thing a consumer brand needs: someone who has heard of you.

So the launch started at zero on every count. No media relationships, no consumer awareness, no shelf presence, and a snack aisle that is not short of bags.

The one asset they did have was the best kind: a true story nobody else could tell. Charles Cretors built the first commercial popcorn machine in 1885, and the family making this popcorn is the fifth generation of his line.

That turned a new brand into an old one. We led every pitch with the heritage rather than the product, because an unknown bag is a hard sell and the inventor of the popcorn machine is a booking.

Then we put it in mouths on air. Chicago Mix is a taste-test product, so we built the broadcast program around on-camera sampling and studio audience giveaways, and timed the pitches to the two weeks a year America thinks hardest about snacks: the Super Bowl and the Oscars. Regional retail stories followed each new Costco and grocery market, so the coverage arrived where the bags had just landed.

3.9 billion impressions and more than $8M in earned PR value.

National placements ran in Good Morning America, HuffPost, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Good Housekeeping, Yahoo News, Food & Wine and Canadian House & Home, alongside on-air tastings across multiple CBS and Fox morning shows, where anchors sampled Chicago Mix live and called it a big hit.

The work contributed to the company’s exit to Eagle Foods.

Watch the broadcast roundup→

When Crier took over social, Chicago Mix had a loyal but modest following of under 6,000 Facebook fans, dwarfed by its competitors. We built a content and promotions program around what made those fans special, a snack obsession worn like a badge of honor, pairing daily community management with a steady calendar of fan-first giveaways.

Campaigns like No Tricks, Just Treats, 12 Days of Cretormas, Ditch the Chips and Seize the Summer turned fans into the brand’s media channel. Cretormas drew 338,000 entries and 606,000 in reach, 99% of it organic. Ditch the Chips reached 689,000 people and generated 295,000 entries on a fraction of the prior budget.

In two years Facebook tripled to nearly 18,000 fans, Twitter doubled, Instagram grew nearly fivefold and Pinterest launched to 1,600 followers, with brand sentiment holding at 85% positive.

Heritage is not nostalgia. When shoppers pick up a bag they have never seen before, they want to know one thing: why should I trust this? Heritage answers that faster than anything else.

A brand that is new to shelves has no track record to point to. A family that has been making popcorn since 1885 has one it can explain in a single sentence, and that sentence is easy for a TV producer to put on air.