Food & Drink Brand of the Year - Philadelphia with Chocolate: Mondelez scores with NPD

There’s a fine line between genius and madness, and Mondelez stayed just the right side of it when it mixed Philadelphia cheese with Cadbury chocolate.

Last January’s launch was backed by a £3.2m push fronted by Joanna Lumley, and in August was joined by a snack pack including mini oatie biscuits that helped sales hit £10m in the first year. If further evidence were needed of the genius of the idea, 66% of these sales were incremental to the overall brand [Nielsen 52 w/e 12 January 2013].

And the innovation wasn’t confined to flavour, with Mondelez rolling out lenticular lids on its Light, Original and Herb variants that did a great job of catching the shopper’s attention on fixture.

With this strong pipeline of NPD - and a further £7.5m marketing activity - Philly demonstrated how a long-established brand can grow. In this case, that growth was 16.4% year-on-year to £111.9m [Nielsen].