How Appetise worked with The Food Company to reduce price sensitivity of premium garlic
“Here's how the Food Company's premium chopped garlic held its ground against private label and mainstream brands, earning an 830% return on ad spend and staying in the basket 99% of the time.”
TLDR
- The Food Company's premium chopped garlic is the priciest option in the aisle, and needed proof that shoppers would trade up when given the chance.
- Placed as the named ingredient across 642 everyday dinner recipes, reaching 1,464 Australian households over six weeks.
- 830% return on ad spend against a 500% commitment, with 23% conversion on their lead SKU.
- The brand stayed in the basket 99% of the time, with fewer than 1 in 100 shoppers swapping it out.
The brand
The Food Company is a family-run Australian condiment maker, stocked in Woolworths and Coles. Their chopped garlic sits at the premium end of the herbs and spices aisle: bigger jar, better fill, and openly the priciest option on shelf. That's a deliberate position, built over two years on a good, better, best argument.
The gap
Premium brands in this category don't usually lose on quality. They lose on position. On shelf, the default wins: whatever's at eye level, whatever's cheapest, whatever the shopper reached for last time. To justify a premium price, a brand has to interrupt that habit, and interrupting habits is slow and expensive. Herbs and spices is a slow burn category, and the brand needed evidence that shoppers would actually trade up when given the chance.
The approach
We placed their garlic into everyday dinner recipes on Appetise, where it appeared as the named ingredient rather than one jar among twenty. Over six weeks, across 642 recipes, the brand reached 1,464 households in Australia. Shoppers could swap it out for anything else in the category at any point, including private label and the mainstream challenger brands.
The proof
- 830% return on ad spend, against a 500% commitment
- 23% conversion from recipe appearance to shopping list on their lead SKU, and 21% on the second
- 99.3% of the time, the brand stayed in the basket. Fewer than 1 in 100 shoppers swapped it out, and one shopper actively traded up from supermarket private label to the premium jar
- Their strongest placements were everyday comfort dinners, not the cuisine-led recipes you'd expect garlic to live in: Wagyu Mince, Garlic & Thyme Cottage Pie (62% capture), Chicken Parmigiana Pasta (58%) and Butter Chicken Lasagne (53%).
The bigger picture
Nobody persuaded these shoppers to spend more. We just changed what they were handed first. In the aisle, the default is set by the planogram and the price tag, and the premium brand spends its life arguing against both. In a recipe, the brand is the default, and the argument never has to happen. Price sensitivity in this category looks a lot less like price sensitivity once the brand stops being the alternative and starts being the answer.
