How Cubery helped Flavortown find its secret sauce

Launched in early 2024 with the backing of Litehouse Foods, Guy Fieri's Flavortown bravely entered the fiercely competitive – but rapidly growing – specialty sauces and condiments category. The brand’s bold flavor lineup, including Kickin' Chipotle and Money Honey BBQ Sauce, was matched only by Fieri’s exuberant personality.

While Guy Fieri is one of the most recognizable personalities in American food media, Flavortown was entering a category dominated by a number of deeply entrenched brands with decades of shopper familiarity and shelf presence. But for challenger brands, success rarely comes down to having a great product alone.

To take on category leaders including Hellmann's, Sweet Baby Ray's, and Kinder's, Flavortown needed a creative strategy that would do more than just generate attention. Yes, the brand needed to break through category sameness, but it was also imperative that it reinforced Flavortown’s distinctive personality and gave shoppers a compelling reason to choose it over established alternatives.

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Campaign: Phase #1


Like is the case for all challenger brands, every media dollar needed to work as hard as possible. To achieve this, the brand partnered with creative effectiveness company, Cubery, to understand the campaign’s potential to drive short-term sales and long-term brand growth.

The Flavortown brand team first tested three assets from the brand’s 2024 launch campaign to get a baseline on what was working and what wasn’t, using these insights to inform creative development for a new campaign scheduled for release in the summer/fall of 2026.

The research uncovered a clear pattern. While Guy Fieri consistently drove engagement, the most impactful ads went further by pairing his unmistakable personality with bold, appetite-inducing food visuals. Together, these elements reinforced Flavortown's positioning as an irreverent, flavor-obsessed challenger brand, helping set it apart from category incumbents.

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Campaign: Phase #2

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In 2026, Flavortown partnered with Boston-headquartered creative agency, Amp, to carry forward learnings from the first round of testing. The brief was simple: double down on what the research proved was already working. Harness Fieri's larger-than-life personality, lean into the brand's irreverent sense of humor, and create advertising that only Flavortown could make.

The new ads were put in for testing again using Cubery’s platform, speaking to sauce and condiment buyers from across the country. The objective was to validate the creative direction, inform media planning, and ensure learnings continued to be captured for future creative development.

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The outcome

The explosive, high-energy theme generated consistently heightened emotional engagement, with moment-by-moment emotion analysis highlighting viewers’ highly attentive state throughout. This culminated in extremely strong predicted in-market impact.

In fact, when benchmarked against all U.S. video ads, both executions ranked comfortably within the top 10% on potential to drive long-term brand growth. Their success was driven by a highly distinctive and ownable creative style that broke category conventions and made Flavortown difficult to ignore.

In a category crowded with familiar brands and lookalike advertising, Flavortown proved that distinctiveness is a powerful growth lever. By reinforcing what makes the brand unique (Guy Fieri's personality, the irreverent humor, and flavor-first positioning) the team was able to create advertising that didn't just get noticed – but gave people a compelling reason to choose Flavortown.