Les Durs À Cuire : Le Jeu — La Revanche De L'Umami
- Brand
- IGA
- Year
- 2022
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Retail
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Sid Lee
Objective
IGA, the Quebec supermarket chain, needed a new way to fund pediatric cancer research for the Fondation Charles-Bruneau as traditional donations declined. Rather than ask shoppers to simply give, the brand and agency Sid Lee built a $2–3 impulse buy at the checkout counter that returned real value — a digital game — while putting the campaign's real subject, kids who had beaten cancer, front and center as the authors of its characters.
Solution
At the IGA checkout, shoppers pick up a sheet of temporary tattoos featuring characters designed by young cancer survivors, flip it over, and scan the QR code on the back with their phone — no app download, no install, straight into a browser game. In the 2022 edition, that opens a side-scrolling platformer set across five flavor worlds: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and a wronged Umami looking for revenge. Each tattoo a family has bought unlocks its matching playable character, and each flavor world is its own level to run and jump through, so the more sheets purchased, the more characters and levels are open to play. Sessions end whenever a level is cleared or the player wanders off — there's no purchase gate mid-game, just more content to return for next time.
Results
Across four annual editions, the Tough Cookies campaign raised $1.7 million for pediatric cancer research and drew over 80,000 players into its digital experiences. The 2022 platformer alone attracted more than 20,000 players, who logged 16,667 sessions and cleared over 4,000 levels, while that edition raised roughly $500,000, beating its fundraising target. The first edition (2021) raised $450,000, and the following year's 2023 "search and find" game drew 7,000+ participants, raised over $400,000, and held players for an average session of about 11 minutes.
- 1
Players enter the game by buying a sheet of temporary tattoos at an IGA checkout, featuring characters drawn by children who have battled or are in remission from cancer. Flipping the sheet over reveals a QR code — the only way in — that opens a browser game tied to that character's own web address, no app required, with separate English and French versions. Players also stick the tattoo onto their skin, a physical reward that works independently of the game.
- 2
The story drops players into a magical world of five flavors — Sweet, Salty, Bitter, Sour and Umami — where Umami, resentful of being valued less than the others, attacks the rest of the flavor world and must be stopped; the premise echoes a real chemotherapy side effect, the loss and distortion of taste.
- 3
Buying and scanning a tattoo sheet unlocks its character as a playable hero, so the more sheets a player buys and scans, the more characters and content open up in the game — and the more money goes to the foundation.
- 4
The core game is a Super Mario Bros.-style 2D side-scrolling platformer with four levels, one per flavor (sweet, salty, sour, bitter), where the player runs and jumps through each stage as their unlocked character.
- 5
Each character has a distinct superpower and voice, and the scenery, sound effects and music for every level were designed by the same children, so the player experiences their own version of the flavor world.
- 6
The following year's edition changes the format: access comes from a tattoo-sheet QR code or from an online donation instead of purchase alone, and the game itself becomes a hidden-object search through large illustrated scenes, where players hunt for 25 hidden characters spanning every past edition. Finding a character unlocks that specific child's cancer-survivor story rather than just registering a find, with a full search taking a family about 11 minutes on either phone or desktop. The game also prompts for a donation without leaving the experience, through its own donation page.
