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Baking vegans happy for Ferguson Plarre

Whether it’s for health, the planet, animals, or just wanting to cut back on a meat-heavy diet, Australians are curious about plant- based products. After 14 months of baking experiments and product testing, the old Ferguson Plarre family pie and sausage roll recipes have been adapted – and perfected - to be vegan friendly. All while using the same traditional artisan methods they’re known and loved for.

Ferguson Plarre Bakehouse (FP) is a family owned bakery operating in Melbourne, Victoria. With 119 years of baking experience, the Plarre family is committed to baking Victorians happy through award winning cakes & pies, made from only the finest ingredients and served at over 80 Ferguson Plarre Bakehouses across Victoria.

We had the pleasure of being tasked with launching their new vegan range to the marketplace, so we broke the campaign into stages, across multiple channels to reach as many of the FP loyal, and help acquire a whole new audience as well.

Phase 1

As part of an overall creative campaign, we launched the Pie Party, with FP CEO, Steve Plarre as the President. His campaign message centred around the need for pies for everyone - including those who choose not to eat meat. It's time, he said.

We rolled this out across social, the FP website, influencers, in-store and POS and had bills posted all over Melbourne.

Phase 2

While we had a long list of influencers who were keen to be involved in this project, we wanted to REALLY puts the pies and sausage rolls through their paces by testing them with a particularly discerning group of pie and sausage roll eaters - tradies! But, here's the special sauce... we didn't tell them they were from the FP vegan range!

We rolled up to a large worksite in Melbourne and fed the group of hungry tradies the new vegan range of pies and sausage rolls - and then we told them.

Here is their reaction:

And the Herald Sun was kind enough to come and take some pics of our lady tradie enjoying their vegan spoils and to share the news of the new range. This was published on page three of the next day's print edition.

Phase 3

As referred above, we engaged a number of (contra) influencers to taste test the new vegan pies and sausage rolls with their family and friends and share their experiences with their audiences. We had particular success in this market with micro-influencers and so engaged a range of audiences across vegans, vegetarians, parenting and lifestyle.

Here is some of the content generated by our influencers:

And here are some of the social stats that support the traction of our launch campaign/s (taken from our campaign report):

INSTAGRAM

INSTAGRAM STORIES

FACEBOOK

CONCLUSION

Each phase and channel in our launch strategy served a different purpose in terms of taking our audience through the awareness, education, action and recommendation stages of launching a new product into the marketplace.

Ferguson Plarre was thrilled with the results and the number of vegan pies and sausage rolls far exceeded the expected uptake upon launch.

Thank you to Steve, Mike, Chris, Dan and the wider FP team for having us along for the adventure.