case study

Client

Lidl Polska

Details

Lidl’s Kitchen has been on YouTube since 2016. During this time, the brand continued to expand into new formats, cooperate with brand ambassadors, and steadily strengthen its position in the culinary world. Over the course of nearly a decade, we built a channel that became one of the most recognisable and trusted destinations for cooking enthusiasts.

After nearly a decade of building an expert-led culinary channel, we concluded that the next step should not be creating more recipes, but creating an experience that would keep viewers coming back episode after episode. We decided to stop competing solely through recipes and start competing through format. And so Kitchen Games was born – an original cooking competition hosted by Orson Hejnowicz, in which popular influencers went head-to-head in a series of challenges, competing for the trophy and the title of best chef.

Challenge

The culinary content market is becoming increasingly competitive. New channels, profiles and formats are emerging, which is why simply publishing more recipes is no longer enough to effectively attract the attention of new viewers.

Our aim was to create a format that goes beyond traditional cooking content and encourages viewers to follow the episodes on a regular basis. We wanted to combine the Lidl’s Kitchen credibility with the mechanisms typical of entertainment formats, such as competition, emotional engagement and active community participation.

With our own film studio, experience in producing large-scale projects and the support of our brand ambassadors, we had the expertise to create a project on a larger scale – one that is engaging, spectacular and meets the expectations of today’s YouTube viewers.

Implementation

Kitchen Games featured eight well-known food influencers. In the first stage, the contestants competed in four head-to-head challenges, and the dishes they prepared were tasted and judged by a panel comprising Lidl Kitchen ambassadors – Karol Okrasa, Kinga Paruzel, Paweł Małecki and the programme’s presenter, Orson Hejnowicz.

Four creators progressed to the next round, where they competed for a place in the grand finale. This structure allowed the programme to build tension gradually and make use of a format familiar from entertainment game shows, while retaining the programme’s culinary focus.

Right from the start, we were also keen to encourage active community involvement – both from the viewers of Lidl’s Kitchen and from the fans of the individual contestants. That is why we have introduced a voting system in the comments section, giving viewers the opportunity to directly influence the course of the competition and decide which creators progress to the next episodes.

Results

Community engagement proved to be a key measure of success. Thousands of comments from viewers appeared beneath the episodes, confirming that viewers were not only watching the programme but were actively participating in the competition and influencing its outcome.

The Kitchen Games programme has shown that a brand with many years’ experience in creating culinary content can successfully move beyond the traditional food content format. By leveraging the credibility we had built over the years, we created a format that combined food and entertainment, engaging the community on an unprecedented scale.