Bold Flavor. Bold Growth.

How a Leading Flavor Brand Turned Street Taco Culture into +4% Market Share Growth with Hispanic Gen Z

The Challenge

A leading flavor brand had strong household penetration but was losing cultural relevance with younger consumers. While it remained a pantry staple for many families, the next generation of home cooks was discovering bold global flavors through restaurants, social media, and street-food culture—often outside the traditional seasoning aisle.

At the same time, the seasoning aisle was becoming more competitive, with emerging challenger brands and private label capturing share from the brand’s traditional consumer base.

To reignite growth, the company needed to look to new growth audiences shaping the future of home cooking—and understand the cultural motivations influencing how they discover, prepare, and share food.

The Insight

Using Collage Group’s cultural intelligence platform, the brand identified a powerful point-of-entry audience competitors were largely overlooking: unacculturated Hispanic Gen Z.

Analysis surfaced several critical growth unlocks:

• A high-growth cooking audience
  Unacculturated Hispanic Gen Z over-indexed on preparing culturally familiar meals at home and introducing friends to those flavors.
• Brand perception gaps
  The brand lagged competitors on two key drivers with this audience: Relevance and Memories.
• Street-food inspiration
  This audience frequently drew inspiration from street-style tacos and regional Mexican flavors, but lacked convenient ways to recreate those dishes at home.
• Retail precision opportunities
  Grocery environments serving multicultural communities offered strong opportunities for bilingual merchandising and cross-category activation.

The Solution

Rather than launching a broad national campaign, the brand partnered with Collage to build a culturally fluent go-to-market strategy rooted in street-food inspiration.

• Product innovation
  Introduced a line of street-inspired seasoning kits designed to recreate popular taco stand flavors at home.
• In-culture creative
  Messaging celebrated taco night as a social food experience, highlighting shared meals, late-night gatherings, and bold flavor discovery.
• Targeted media and retail activation
  Media investments prioritized culturally relevant digital platforms and creator-led cooking content.
• Retail merchandising
  Bilingual POP displays and cross-merchandising with tortillas, proteins, and produce helped drive discovery in key grocery environments.

The Results

By putting cultural specificity at the center of its strategy, the brand transformed a pantry staple into a culturally relevant cooking experience.

• +4% market share growth driven by the unacculturated Hispanic consumer segment
• Significant gains in Relevance and Memories with younger multicultural audiences
• A halo effect across the portfolio, lifting performance beyond the core target audience