Case study
Brazilian coffee brand partners with
newspaper Estado de São Paulo to prove freshness


No doubt, coffee is one of the loved brews among Brazilians. In the South American country, coffee brand Cafe Pele partners with the newspaper Estado de São Paulo to prove freshness of its product. In the campaign, before hitting the shelves of grocery stores and supermarkets, Cafe Pele delivers its products being warped in the front page of the newspaper’s morning copy.

The bare fact is that people enjoy coffee when it’s served fresh. This is the simple reason why Estado de São Paulo wraps Cafe Pele coffee beans to indicate how freshly they packed their brew when they deliver it in the morning. Every day, when the newspaper starts distributing, approximately 5000 bags of coffee beans are sold. This is a win-win move for both the coffee brand and the newspaper.

Reason for wrapping

In the coffee heartland like Brazil, locals often come to believe that fresh coffee is available only at coffee shops. In this, Cafe Pele wants to prove otherwise, making a point that even packaged coffee can turn out to be fresh. Handled by São Paulo-based ad agency Lew'Lara\TBWA, the vacuum coffee packs being wrapped in the front page of Estado de São Paulo are displayed on the shelves of supermarkets in the city by around 8:00am. Subscribers of the newspaper however get the Cafe Pele packs delivered along with the day’s copy.

Innovative marketing

These days, in brand promotion activities, innovations could be done in two effective ways through a proper media route. In the first way, companies invest huge to adopt an ultra-modern communication system to communicate with their target customers or end users, making news something more than what it is. And secondly, some companies create campaign by partnering with a brand or an institution in the way Cafe Pele has done in co-operation with Estado de São Paulo.

Urban population in the popular coffee-growing regions like Brazil always assumes their old brand is tastier than anything else. Keeping such common approach of people in mind, Cafe Pele and Estado de São Paulo have done an effective job, making the thinking simple as their intention comes out as a stroke of brilliance. In India, freshest food is wrapped in stale newspapers in which the latest copy could be that of yesterday—take the example of vada-pav vendors in Mumbai. But this concept has been taken forward in a cool and newer way by Cafe Pele and Estado de São Paulo.

Unique partnership

For the unique partnership, Cafe Pele and Estado de São Paulo would make a mutual understanding as the coffee brand shouldn’t leak any of the front page news before hitting the store shelves. The marketing model is claimed to have got massive traction on social media. Industry experts have their view saying this campaign would gain real profits and promote brand to a new level. As long as varieties of commodities are time and again wrapped in newspapers, this marketing model can be further implemented in a number of areas, beyond coffee. Production process

In the promotional campaign of Cafe Pele and Estado de São Paulo, more than 2.5 tons of coffee is proven to be packed fresh. The campaign has impacted around 950,000 people, increasing approximately 400 percent in sales, in which more that 179 percent are through social media. Facebook alone scores 100,000 interactions during first three days of the campaign.

‘This coffee was vacuum-packed today; here’s the proof’— this is what it imprints on a label that wraps every single pack of Cafe Pele coffee beans. The newspaper’s front page is the testimony for the buyers at point of sale (POS) to ensure they are picking up fresh coffee being packed a few hours ago. However, those who are subscribers of Estado de São Paulo don’t require walking to a nearby supermarket to pick up the Front Page Pack of Pele Cafe beans.

In the production process, Estado de São Paulo finalises its front page at 11:38pm every night. Then the Pele Cafe pack is redesigned using the newspaper’s front page. At 12:54am, while the newspaper page was printing, Cafe Pele also works on printing its new package that will hit the supermarket shelves next morning. In the company’s factory at 3:35am, 5,000 Front Page Packs of Cafe Pele coffee beans are vacuum-packed. Then latest by 8:11am in the morning, the packs arrive at stores.


Estado de São Paulo

Also known as O Estadão or simply Estadão, Estado de São Paulo is a 142 years old broadsheet daily newspaper published from São Paulo and distributed all over Brazil. Owned by Grupo Estado, a holding company that also publishes Jornal da Tarde and runs radio channels like Rádio Eldorado AM and FM and a news agency Agência Estado, Estado de São Paulo is the second largest-circulated newspaper in São Paulo and fourth across Brazil.


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