Mexican is lauded as a quick, tasty and healthy meal. But consumers’ biggest pain point is that it is quite messy. To address this, Old El Paso created Tortilla Pockets – a genius solution that heralds the arrival of mess-free Mexican.
Rather than just telling consumers about it though, we knew that the proof would be in seeing this latest product innovation in action…
To truly demonstrate just how mess-free Tortilla Pockets really were, we partnered with leading Australian tennis star, Nick Kyrgios, and challenged him to take part in the #MessFreeChallenge – playing full tilt whilst holding a Tortilla Pocket, and posting it across his social accounts. For every share of his video, we also donated an additional Mexican meal kit to Foodbank to support families in need.
Leveraging the popularity of social media challenges, and existing Instagram behaviours, the challenge quickly gained momentum. Tennis stars across Europe joined to support, including British icon Andy Murray, Gael Monfils and Garbine Muguruza with it expanding to the Americas and Asia with Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin and Olympic champion Monica Puig.
The #MessFreeChallenge resulted in 50 million social accounts being reached and generated 1 billion + coverage impressions globally with over 200 articles across Europe and Australia alone.
Tortilla Pockets also exceeded its sales forecast by 60% across Australia and Europe and brought in 70% new shoppers to the Mexican category.
Most significantly, the initiative has also resulted in the joint donation by tennis stars and Old El Paso of over 100,000 meal kits to families in need, all as part of Old El Paso’s initiative to fight food insecurity.




