Free The Fruit
View the case- Brand
- Boost Juice
- Year
- 2016
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- App
Objective
Boost Juice needed to win customers back into stores after a loyalty program that hadn't moved the needle, and to reach shoppers somewhere other than the counter. With Australians spending more than 12% of their phone time on games, the brand set out to meet them on that ground and reward the engagement with something usable in a real store.
Solution
Free the Fruit is a match-3 puzzle built around a rescue story: a fruitnapper has taken Boost Juice's fruit, and Mango Man has to break into stores across the country to get it back. Players swipe rows of fruit to clear each level's target and fight boss characters guarding the way to the next store on the map. Every fruit freed can be kept or thrown into the blender, which pays out a one-time voucher — a free Boost, a discount, or protein balls — and levels also drop collectible cards carrying bonus codes for power-ups. Because the voucher only works once it's scanned at the till, finishing a level sends the player straight back into a physical Boost Juice.
Results
Free the Fruit was the No.1 free game on Australia's App Store by its second day and the No.1 Australian iPhone game overall within its first week, reaching No.2 among all Australian iPhone apps on launch weekend. It drew more than 300,000 Australian downloads and 3.6 million play sessions over an eight-week run, averaging just over 15 minutes per session for upwards of 55 million minutes of total play. The game beat its own gameplay-volume target by 15% in its first four days, and the response led Boost to double the in-game drinks promotion from four weeks to eight.
- 1
Players download the free "Boost Juice — Free the Fruit" app, published by Retail Zoo, which opens on a premise: Boost Juice has been blending millions of fruit, and hero Mango Man sets out to break into Boost stores across the country to rescue his fruit friends after one of them vanishes.
- 2
Progress is tracked on a map of real Boost Juice store locations across Australian cities; clearing a level frees the fruit trapped in that store and advances the player to the next one on the map.
- 3
Each level is a match-3 board: players swap adjacent fruit to line up three or more of a kind.
- 4
Every level sets fruit-collection objectives to hit within a limited number of moves before the level's final stage unlocks.
- 5
Once the objectives are met, the player faces a store's "fruitnapper" in a boss fight where matches on the board function as attacks, including special combinations that deal extra damage; defeating the boss frees the store's fruit and opens the next level.
- 6
Between levels, players can redeem bonus codes printed on collectible Boost cards for in-game boosts and power-ups.
- 7
Freed fruit accumulates on the player's running total, and once a minimum threshold is reached, the player chooses between banking the fruit to keep accumulating or sending it into the blender to try for a prize.
- 8
Blending fruit draws from a pool of 3 million vouchers — free drinks, discounts, protein balls, or bundle deals, with a larger blend improving the odds of a free drink — and the resulting one-time, time-limited voucher is redeemed by scanning its barcode at a real Boost Juice register.
- 9
Players also compete on a weekly leaderboard, with top finishers reported to win free-drink vouchers and the top five receiving prizes by mail.
- 10
Freeing the fruit from every store leads to a final in-game meeting with Boost Juice founder Janine Allis.
