Xtreme Xrunch Kart
- Brand
- Xrunch
- Year
- 2010
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- App
- Agency
- CP+B
- With
- UNIT9
- With
- Anrick
Objective
Bolthouse Farms was trying to sell baby carrots into a snack market worth $18 billion, where the category itself had been stuck flat and carrots read to kids and teens as "good for you" rather than fun. As part of the "Eat 'Em Like Junk Food" campaign, the brand needed a reason for that audience to reach for a carrot the way they'd reach for chips, and a stunt that would get the test-market launch talked about.
Solution
Players take a rocket-powered shopping cart through five XTREME levels of a gritty, anime-styled city, steering by tilting the phone. But the cart won't speed up or pull off tricks from tapping the screen — you have to hold a real baby carrot up to the microphone and bite down, and the game reads the crunch as your throttle. Ride quiet or chew halfheartedly and the cart lags; crunch hard and often and it rockets forward, so getting through a level fast means actually eating carrots while you play. It turns the product itself into the controller: no carrot, no game.
Results
Bolthouse Farms' test-market sales rose 10–12% year over year during the campaign. The $450,000 push, running one month across the Syracuse and Cincinnati test markets starting September 13, 2010, generated over 500 million PR impressions valued at $15 million, and the game itself was downloaded and played in more than 75 countries.
- 1
The player downloads the game for free from the iTunes App Store onto an iPhone or iPod touch, with a supported device and iOS version required to run it.
- 2
Before playing, the player gathers a real prop: a bag of actual baby carrots, and sets up the phone's microphone in a quiet space so it can pick up crunching sounds.
- 3
The game opens on a junk-food-packaging, 90s-extreme-sports-styled main menu, then a cutscene introduces an anime-styled extreme character who pilots a rocket-powered shopping cart.
- 4
The player races the cart across five side-view "XTREME" levels set in gritty urban courses with ramps, viewed from the side but with depth on the Z-axis.
- 5
Steering is handled by tilting the device itself, using the accelerometer rather than touch controls, leaving the player's hands free to hold a carrot.
- 6
The core loop is biting and crunching a real carrot near the microphone: the game's "Crunchonic Technology" detects the crunch sound and converts it into a speed boost, which the player must time to onscreen acceleration zones to score well.
- 7
While airborne, the same crunching input instead triggers gravity-defying air tricks that earn bonus points.
- 8
If the player runs out of carrots, the game offers to buy more Bolthouse carrots or lets the player simply say "crunch" aloud to keep playing.
- 9
Each run ends on a results screen showing the level score, after which the player moves on to the next of the five levels.
