LittleBlackBook: New Dole Campaign Shocks Diners with Surprise Addition to Full English Breakfast

The campaign was created with The Ninety-Niners and directed by Jeremy Ervine.

Building on their award-winning “Add Some Wow” campaign, fruit brand Dole Sunshine Company has released a new hidden-camera stunt to further challenge British consumers to put tinned pineapple on their Full English Breakfast. The campaign was created by The Ninety-Niners in partnership with Truman Films, and media planning and buying by JKO as part of The 99Collective.

The campaign saw Dole creating their own pop-up café in central Manchester – dubbed Café Wow – where every Full English comes served with a delicious grilled pineapple slice, whether you asked for it or not. 

The film captures the bemused, shocked, angry, and sometimes pleasantly surprised reactions to the surprise addition. The reactions to someone besmirching a sacrosanct national dish with something that doesn’t typically belong are strong and immediate. However, as Dole’s waiter points out, pineapple has long been a traditional component of the Full English and was a firm favourite of King Charles II. Though not all diners were impressed, once they tried the dish most quickly realise that the sweetness of the pineapple is actually the perfect accompaniment to cut-through the fatty flavours of the beloved bacon and sausages.

The English Breakfast Society said pineapple has been eaten with Full English breakfasts for centuries, and has called for it to reclaim its place on the traditional British brekkie. Guise Bule de Missenden, the society’s founder and chair, told the Daily Telegraph: “A slice of grilled pineapple can add variety to the English breakfast plate. Simply swap the mushrooms or tomato for a grilled pineapple slice in someone’s English breakfast one day to give them a surprising and unexpected delight.”

The campaign will be promoted across Facebook and Instagram and supported by PR from Finn & Partners.

Si Goodall, co-founder of The Ninety-Niners said, “Earlier this year, the mere suggestion of pineapple on your Full English was enough to provoke a national debate that made it on to the News at Ten. Now, we wanted to get people trying it for real and generate the same extreme reactions, both good and bad.”

Anna Kovaleva, senior marketing manager at Dole Sunshine Company said, “Café Wow is the latest iteration in our boundary pushing campaign to challenge people’s perceptions of tinned pineapple as an ingredient. We’ve once again deliberately focussed on an untouchable national dish in order to provoke a strong reaction from real people. It feels viscerally wrong, and almost treasonous to mess with the classics, but when people actually try it, they realise that our new Tropical Gold Pineapple range is perfect for cooks who want to add some wow to any dish.”

Original article posted by LittleBlackBook on 1st October 2024 can be viewed here.