Tesco's Food Love Stories: seven years of real dish tales take the UK Grand Effie

After the 2014 accounting crisis, new CEO Dave Lewis hired BBH in 2015 to rebuild Tesco's reputation. The brand needed to show it understood food and customers again — not price slogans, but a point of view it could sustain for years.

Make real stories about food the brand platform: each film stars a customer, the dish they cook for someone they love, and the Tesco colleague who helped

Launched 9 January 2017 with 'David's hot-or-not chicken curry', a husband secretly sweetening his portion of the dish he cooks his wife. Each story pairs a real customer's dish with recipe cards, a content hub and in-store fixtures. The same platform refreshed seasonally for seven years, then closed in 2025 with a new brand idea.

Tesco won the Grand Effie at the 2022 UK Effie Awards for 'Wearing in, not Wearing out: Six Years of Food Love Stories (and counting)', in a year Effie UK handed a record eight Golds. Marketing Week named Tesco Brand of the Year 2020, crediting the platform, and by Christmas 2024 Tesco held 28.5% UK market share, its highest since 2016.

Tesco entered 2017 with its brand still recovering from the 2014 accounting scandal. Its first major campaign from newly hired BBH, launched on 9 January, was 'Food love stories brought to you by Tesco' — films telling the stories behind real meals customers cook for the people closest to them, from a 15-year 'hot-or-not' chicken curry onward. Group brand director Michelle McEttrick framed it as putting food, not price, at the heart of the business.

The format was deliberately repeatable: one customer, one dish, one Tesco colleague who helped make it happen, extended through recipe cards, a content hub and store fixtures. That elasticity let the same idea carry seasonal pushes and pandemic-era work for seven years, with new stories every year rather than a new platform.

In 2022 Effie UK gave Tesco the Grand Effie for 'Wearing in, not Wearing out: Six Years of Food Love Stories (and counting)', praising a platform that 'delivers a tangible impact to the brand and the wider business year after year'. Marketing Week credited it when naming Tesco Brand of the Year 2020, and by the 2024 festive season Tesco's UK market share reached 28.5% — its highest since 2016 — before the platform was retired in 2025.

Post-crisis Tesco needed credibility, not volume: real customer stories demonstrated understanding of food in a way price advertising never could.

The format's constraints — one person, one dish, one colleague — made every new execution cheap to produce and instantly recognizable as Tesco's.

Longevity was the strategy: the same platform absorbed Christmas, community and pandemic briefs, so every year of media spend compounded on the same memory structure.

It connected film to store: recipe cards and fixtures turned an emotional ad idea into something shoppers could act on the same day.

A brand platform earns effectiveness by compounding, not reinventing: one flexible story format, refreshed but never swapped, wore in instead of wearing out.

The platform ran through Christmas 2024 and was retired in February 2025, replaced by 'It's Not a Little Thing. It's Everything', also made with BBH. Its legacy inside Tesco: Marketing Week's Brand of the Year 2020, a Grand Effie in 2022, and the highest UK market share since 2016 by the end of its run. The idea has been taught since as a case of sustained brand platforms outperforming year-on-year reinvention.