Before this year, if you tried to order a dinosaur or helicopter online, you were either experiencing a severe psychiatric break or Michael Jackson .

But in 2022, Lunchables made it possible to order everything from dinosaurs and drumsets to bears and baseball fields - even flying saucers and Spongebob Squarepants - straight to your front door, without triggering a government-mandated welfare check.

We called it, Lunchabuild This.

For the campaign, we rebuilt Lunchables’ entire brand strategy and business model around a simple idea: for kids, Lunchables is more than just a meal - it’s a means of personal expression. At a time when everything is already decided for them, Lunchables became a child’s outlet for creativity and imaginative exploration. They could build their lunch, their way. And no adult could tell them gummy worms weren’t a perfect pizza topping. or that their Cracker Stacker couldn’t be a rocketship. Or that the JFK Magic-Bullet Theory wasn’t worth looking into (**potentially only applicable to my childhood**).

They could build, and eat, whatever they wanted, however they wanted (like a post contract-extension James Harden).

To kick it off, we worked with renowned food stylists to create over 30 different builds kids could make using just the elements in the pack. Then, we changed Lunchables’ entire e-commerce model to allow customers to “Order by Build,” selling by the builds you could make with Lunchbables rather than just the ingredients included. With 1 click, you could order a boat, bulldozer, baseball cap, or baby grand piano through Instacart - receiving all the packs you’d need to build it, and colorful blueprints to help guide you.

And to spread the word about how we transformed lunchtime into playtime, we turned the entire world into our playground, placing massive builds everywhere from CitiBike stations and bus shelters to the MLB Field of Dreams, the San Diego Zoo, and the Ant-Man World Premiere. Finally, the Michael Douglas x Lunchables collaboration kids had been clamoring for since Basic Instinct (1992).

Plus, every ad could be scanned to order that build instantly.

We even launched our own fleet of “Lunchabuses” across San Francisco, which quickly went viral. We received thousands of tweets, media coverage, fan-made Halloween costumes, and even a Change.org petition to keep the Lunchabus in SF for another 5 years - finally addressing definitely the only issue currently in San Francisco.

Responses included:

• @sbuss: “The Lunchabus is a great piece of whimsy in a city that needs more of it”

• @40goingon28: “Lunchabus hive, rise up”

• @laurenfitz016: “Only the Lunchabus can save us now. We are all Lunchabus”

• @adamcshanks: “Imagine being a tourist and thinking you’re going to ride an iconic SF cable car and instead you get on a freaking ham wagon.”

• @uhshanti: “Every single time I have seen the Lunchabus, I have interrupted everyone I’m with to say ‘LOOK IT’S THE LUNCHABUS’ and then cursed myself as I realize that’s exactly what those corporate rat bastards at Lunchables want from me.”

But best of all, we completely reinvented the way kids could order food, showing them our product the way they’d always imagined it in their minds - and getting them inspired to create food worlds of their own every time they sat down for lunch.

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Art Director: Ed King

Creative Directors: Kurt Mills, Daniel Righi