Daiya Dupes ‘Pizza Experts’ With Plant-Based Cheese

Hard-core Green Bay Packers fans—the ones wearing foam blocks of cheddar as hats—would not consider showing up on game day with a plant-based cheese pizza as a snack.

That party foul could result in “unhappy townspeople wielding pitchforks,” according to a focus group member who went medieval in his opinion of cheese alternatives.

But moments earlier, unbeknownst to this hater, he had been chowing down on the very object of his derision—and he even went back for seconds. So much for his discerning palate.

Daiya, a leader in the plant-based cheese category, gathered three different groups of “pizza experts” for a Q&A, preceded by a buffet of the brand’s piping hot pizza slices. Everybody ate, nobody complained and yet the barbs flew as soon as an interviewer started the session.

Five adorable children promised they’d never eat plant-based pizza because “it would taste disgusting,” according to one kid, as another fake puked. And in a group of pizza deliverers, one man said, “I don’t see a future in plant-based pizza” because discerning foodies “really couldn’t even consider it a pizza.”

The campaign, under the umbrella heading “Skeptics,” leans into a tactic that Daiya has used successfully before. The brand, via its longtime agency of record TDA Boulder, again confronts criticism of a category that has traditionally struggled in its flavor and texture profiles.

The goal was to “get unknowing approval from pizza and cheese experts and show the bias head on,” Jonathan Schoenberg, the agency’s executive creative director and partner, told Adweek. “The brief was, how do we speak to our skeptics, because we have a lot of them.”

“Skeptics” also revisits a well-worn trope in advertising: embracing negative reviews to show the brand’s sense of humor, pulling a swap on consumers and then providing testimonials to bolster the product. 

In this case, the eating does the talking, with the spots leaving out the consumers’ reactions when they learned they had been duped.

“We skipped the reveal,” Schoenberg said. “This is a creative territory that has been tread before, and we wanted to make sure this work felt fresh.”

Plant curious

Daiya, with a home base in Canada and distribution at 25,000 U.S. retailers, has expanded beyond its flagship cheese line into frozen pizza and “cheezecake,” salad dressings, sauces and boxed “mac and cheeze” in recent years. 

With the ads, the brand introduces a new tagline, “100% plant-based even if you’re not,” intending to appeal to more flexitarians and reach beyond the niche vegan and vegetarian demos.

“Daiya wants to be inclusive to everyone,” according to John Kelly, vice president of consumer marketing. “Getting people to eat plant-based is hard because they often think the taste won’t be good, so we wanted to create an ad that would combat that apprehension.”

The agency team sees the tagline as “a long overdue invitation.”

“It seems ridiculous in terms of the category that this is such an original approach,” Schoenberg said, noting that “more non plant-based people should’ve been welcomed into plant-based foods sooner.” 

The category has leaned into gourmet positioning, he said, and might seem aloof to some consumers, while certain plant-based segments like meat and dairy “are now part of the culture war.”

“Rather than pour fuel on that fire, we want to welcome as many people in as possible and allow for trial and a potentially partial plant-based diet,” Schoenberg said.

Inflationary swings

Dairy substitutes are a thriving segment of the overall $8 billion plant-based food industry, though products’ higher prices have hurt sales recently as consumers battle inflation at the grocery store.

Plant-based cheese accounted for $233 million in U.S. retail sales in 2022, per Spins data, with 47 million units sold. Its retail dollar and unit sales dipped slightly—2% and 5% respectively—in 2022 after seeing double-digit growth in the previous few years. 

The products, made from soy, nuts, peas and other ingredients, still have only 5% household penetration and about 1% of the dairy category, but tout 50% repeat buyers, according to Spins.

Daiya continues to try to build awareness and boost sales with ads that have included homages to film noir and laugh-tracked sitcoms. The brand is pushing “Skeptics” through digital, connected TV and social media buys, in addition to an experiential pop-up recently at Two Boots pizzeria in New York’s West Village.