What does a tiny puppet have in common with an actor from Hulu’s The Bear and a member of the Wu-Tang Clan? Well, they’re all chefs, of course.

Food delivery app DoorDash is back in the Super Bowl after a year off following its 2021 debut, which took place on Sesame Street and starred Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs.

This time around, the brand is highlighting its grocery delivery offering. Launched in 2020, DoorDash now has “tens of thousands” of grocery partners, it said, including Albertsons Companies, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Dollar General, Sprouts, Walgreens and Wawa. The brand declined to share specific numbers due to upcoming earnings.

“We tend to wait until we have the near-perfect product before telling the world about it,” David Bornoff, head of brand marketing at DoorDash, told Adweek. “We think that we’re finally in a place where it deserves that main stage.”

A multigenerational play on chefs

The 30-second spot, created in partnership with The Martin Agency, kicks off a six-month campaign simply titled: “We Get Groceries.”

It takes a playful tone, with The Bear’s Matty Matheson urging the trio’s shopping partner to “smell the butt” of a pineapple to see if it’s ripe. Raekwon the Chef then advises reaching to the back of the fridge for the freshest cream—to which the shopper responds with a line from the Wu-Tang Clan song, C.R.E.A.M. Raekwon is unimpressed.

Tiny Chef, the stop-motion animated star of Nickelodeon’s The Tiny Chef Show, reminds the shopper to give watermelons a knock to check for ripeness, and inexplicably does the back stroke through a vat of jelly beans.

The three chefs might not have much overlap when it comes to their fanbases, but Bornoff said that’s by design.

“They speak to three distinct audiences, but it’s reflective of who the DoorDash customer is,” he said. “We used to joke that our audience was anybody with a mouth … today, our audience is anybody who’s looking for the best of their neighborhood, who wants access to groceries in their neighborhood, and who is using delivery apps—which tends to be a huge swath of the population.”

Super Bowl ads as momentum builders

Things have changed in two years, though. With widespread Covid-19 lockdowns relegated to the past, the wave that DoorDash rode into its last Super Bowl appearance has largely evened out. And with inflation squeezing household budgets, grocery delivery is a different proposition than restaurant delivery was in 2021.

“For consumers, the one area that things have shifted [in recent years] is the level of authenticity that they hold brands up to,” Eunice Shin, direct-to-consumer brand marketing expert and partner at consultancy Prophet, told Adweek. “They want brands to be honest, they want brands to be authentic. And when things come across as disingenuous or forced, that falls flat.”

Still, viewers may appreciate the notes of nostalgia that Raekwon the Chef hits for Gen Xers, the current buzz around Matty Matheson as Season 2 of The Bear approaches and the slapstick silliness of The Tiny Chef.

The crucial piece—regardless of how viewers respond to the ad in the moment—is what the Super Bowl ad leads to after gameday, Shin said. “It’s not just one advertisement, one and done,” she said. “How do you keep the conversation going and make that a starting point or momentum builder for you as a brand? That’s really where savvy marketing comes in play.”