Tesco Food

Delivering a data-driven ‘always-on’ food programme that wins awards and drives revenue

Tesco is the UK’s largest supermarket with a brand promise focused on helpfulness, value and quality. For over 16 years, Cedar has been helping to inspire and empower customers by making shopping, cooking and eating as easy and enjoyable as possible. We do this by marrying first-class content with market-leading experiences, ensuring that Tesco thinks like a publisher as well as a brand. Tesco’s reach allows us to put data at the heart of our work with a focus on growing SOV through a rapid programme of digital transformation.

Tesco social

With over 4 million followers, Tesco’s social media presence is among the biggest in its sector. A mix of short-form recipe tips and inspiration and longer-form presenter-led challenges and storytelling keeps users coming back daily. Customer needs and behaviours drive all of the social activations, from interactive Q&As to helpful hacks and step-by-step videos. Our newsroom team scans the channels daily to find the conversations and trends that matter most to Tesco’s customers, turning that insight into cut-through content that has helpfulness at its heart. Reactive content crafted to meet the needs of the nation during lockdown saw engagement on Tesco’s social channels soar, hitting numbers five times higher than benchmarks.

Commercial content

Generating revenue from content is part of our Tesco content model and we work in partnership with a wide variety of brands to produce cross-channel campaigns that ultimately drive engagement, awareness and sales. We develop campaigns that meet both Tesco’s and their brand partners’ objectives and address key customer pain points - whether that’s providing value-focused inspiration, saving time in the kitchen or giving help for hosting family and friends. On average these campaigns drive a 32% uplift in sales and over 18M impressions.

Content experiences and tools

Cedar has helped position Tesco at the forefront of content innovation. When lockdown put paid to Tesco’s annual ‘Christmas in July’ event, we built and launched an exclusive online event experience for journalists. We also transformed Tesco’s Community Cookery School into an online education experience, training 300 cooks how to teach 4,500 people in their communities through a series of virtual classes, all delivered in 10 weeks. Out of challenging times has come game-changing digital tools and services, too, most notably our ‘What Can I Make With…?’ recipe finder, created to help people faced with ingredient limitations and a lack of inspiration. With 325,000 views during May 2020 alone – the equivalent of 10,483 recipe suggestions a day – this tool continues to play an integral part in customers’ lives.