Premier Foods, the UK’s No. 1 food manufacturer, has signed an exciting new deal for its Asian brand Sharwoods to fund Chinese Food in Minutes, a 13 episode cookery series to be broadcast on Wednesdays at 7.30pm on Channel Five.
In addition, underpinning this activity, Sharwoods is maximizing the popular Chinese New Year occasion by refreshing its range of stir fry sauces and noodles with some exciting new variants to encourage consumers to reappraise Chinese food and drive incremental sales. The total oriental launch support campaign is worth in excess of £2m and kicks off in early February.
The Chinese Food in Minutes partnership marks Premier Foods first move into advertiser funded content and will drive consideration of Chinese cooking and Sharwood’s Chinese product range through an integrated package of rights associated with the series which will feature Sharwood’s brand accreditation on all its UK TV transmissions, promotional trails and on-demand through Five’s ‘Demand Five’ service and is expected to drive significant sales for the brand.
In addition, an exclusively branded microsite will feature video, recipes, episodes guides and ‘Cook-along with Ching’ using Sharwoods products. The TV series will commence in Feb in the week leading up to Chinese New Year’s Day.
Sharwoods is No.1 in oriental sauces and accompaniments, which is growing at +11% Sharwood’s is helping to drive this growth with +12%.
Chinese New Year is the single biggest meal event in cooking sauces which offers a +35% uplift and attracts +44% new shoppers each year.
A huge opportunity exists within this key occasion and beyond for stir fry sauces to gain incremental meal occasions. There are 169 million stir fry meal occasions, but only 39% of these feature a stir fry sauce.
To maximise this key category opportunity Sharwoods is refreshing its stir Fry range with recipe improvements and introducing a new popular Chinese flavour -Chow Mein – into the seven strong range.
To complement this, Sharwoods is also expanding its range of ready to wok wet noodles – Thick Udon style noodles & Fine noodles – and a new Dry Medium Chilli Noodle to meet the Stir Fry/Wok meal occasion of the Sharwoods Shopper.
Sarah Frederickson, Sharwoods Brand Controller, says: “Sharwoods is thrilled to be partnering Chinese Food in Minutes. The program will index highly with our target audience and we are confident that the partnership will encourage consumers not only to reappraise Chinese cooking, but the halo effect of partnering with Ching’s expertise coupled with the launch of our refreshed Stir Fry range will generate incremental sales right across the entire Sharwoods range. We urge retailers to stock up to take advantage of this key opportunity.”
Sharwoods will be supporting the Chinese New Year occasion in -store with a range of POS including FSDU’s, barkers, Gondola ends, in-store sampling and promotional meal deals. Plus pallet wrap front of store displays in Wholesale depots.
Sharwoods Stir Fry sauces RRP at £1.30, the Wet noodles (Udon and Fine) RRP is £1.25 and the Dry noodles (Chilli) is £1.3
Source: Premier Foods
