Condiment brand Primal Kitchen is teaming up with Pinterest to host a culinary pop-up this month.
Dubbed Colorful Kitchen Pop-Ups, Primal Kitchen and Pinterest will host events in three cities where influencers will serve up custom light meals and snacks made with Primal Kitchen seasonings while also sharing cooking tips. The first event will feature Carolina Gelen, a food influencer with 1 million followers on Instagram. Pinterest has previously tested the pop-up concept with Anthropologie, but this marks the platform's first direct collaboration with a food brand.
For Pinterest, the pop-up is just one of the ways the platform is looking to make more in-person appearances this year — it also held its first-ever in-person activation at Coachella this year — and for Primal Kitchen, the partnership is its latest physical activation to drive brand awareness for its healthful products as it expands into big-box retailers.
The “kitsch kitchen” aesthetic is currently trending on Pinterest, which was the inspiration for the concept's design. The pop-up will serve live dips to go with recipes based on Pinterest trends, and will feature Primal Kitchen favorites like Ranch Dressing, Original Mayonnaise and Buffalo Sauce. According to Pinterest, search terms like “clean food” have skyrocketed since last year, and searches for dips and snack hacks are up 100% year-over-year. Participants will also receive Primal Kitchen merchandise and swag.
The Colorful Kitchen pop-up will kick off with a two-day event at Flatiron Plaza on July 17th, before moving to Chicago's Pioneer Court on July 23rd and the Original Farmers Market in Los Angeles on July 28th.
Primal Kitchen, which launched in 2015, sells dressings and marinades made with avocado oil. Anna Goetsch, head of marketing for Primal Kitchen, told Modern Retail that Pinterest has been a big part of the brand's channel mix since it launched.
“Pinterest drives a ton of traffic to us, so it's a big part of our social ad spend,” she said. While the brand declined to share specific figures it spends on Pinterest ads, Goetch said, “We buy media directly from Pinterest and get the lowest CPMs in the entire food and beverage industry.” Primal Kitchen has nearly 40,000 followers on Pinterest and gets about 4.6 million monthly views on the platform.
To digitally promote Colorful Kitchen, the pop-ups will feature QR codes for trending topics that visitors can explore on Pinterest. The pop-ups will feature pins for those trending topics along with QR codes, directing visitors to the content or retailer to purchase the recipe items. “We want to dominate trends like clean eating, high protein, etc.,” says Goetch. “This partnership also gives us a unique connection to retailers.”
As the brand gains presence in traditional retail chains, Goetch said, building awareness of availability in retailers is becoming a priority. Primal Kitchen products are available at retailers such as Target, Whole Foods and Wegmans. “We saw 30 percent growth through our distribution points at Walmart alone last year,” Goetch said.
The move comes on the heels of Primal Kitchen ramping up in-person brand building to reach a mainstream customer base: By hosting these types of events and talking to people, Goetsch said, “we realized there was still a gap among our target consumer.”
Sarah Pollack, head of global consumer marketing at Pinterest, said the Colorful Kitchen pop-up brings to life many of the food trends currently popular on Pinterest. This year, she said, searches for “clean food” have surged 9,794% on Pinterest, while “clean snacks” and “high protein dips” have increased 187% and 97%, respectively. Pollack noted that this data reflects a growing interest in clean food, especially among Gen Z.
“The Colorful Kitchen Pop-up with Primal Kitchen is our first partnership in one of Pinterest's most popular areas: food,” Pollack said. The goal is to show visitors how to use Pinterest as a place to find recipe inspiration. “This partnership allows us to be in the shoes of our Gen Z users as they enter young adulthood and start experimenting with more food.”
In addition to providing inspiration for Primal Kitchen's recipes, the pop-up store also taps into on-trend kitchen design, according to a Pinterest Predicts report released last December: “One of the biggest trend predictions for 2024 was 'kitsch kitchen,' which predicted a rise in quirky, bright, vintage-inspired kitchen décor,” Pollack said.
John Clear, senior director in Alvarez & Marsal's consumer and retail group, said social platforms like Pinterest and TikTok are visual and focused, making them quick to spread specific health and wellness trends.
“Algorithms are quick to pick up on trends and push new recipes or hacks that skyrocket in popularity,” Clear said. Past examples include recipes like whipped coffee and cauliflower rice, which have since gained mainstream popularity. “The sustainability of these trends is less clear, as platforms' priority is 'new' content, not simply reinforcing what came before,” Clear added.
As a result, Clear says brands like Primal Kitchen can leverage content creation, recipe sharing and user-generated content to promote their products to this highly engaged audience. “Cooking pop-ups can act as education hubs where consumers learn about ingredients, cooking techniques and the nutritional benefits of products,” Clear says, and they also help build community and generate buzz on social media.
Pinterest's goal is to continue testing physical marketing and drive awareness of the platform's discovery tools. “Our consumer marketing strategy this year is to appear IRL in Pinterest-branded moments in ways that surprise and delight consumers,” Pollack said.
Gotch said the pop-up is an extension of outdoor and in-person campaigns Primal Kitchen has been running over the past year, including a Super Bowl-themed billboard promotion in Las Vegas earlier this year and handing out wings made with Primal Kitchen products at tailgate parties.
“We saw success both in terms of general awareness and in certain markets,” Goetch said. “We wanted to take what we learned from 2023 and put it into practice on an even bigger scale this year,” she added.
“The metric for this event is to measure how much buzz we're building in earned media,” Goetch said.
