It was just last summer that Kellogg opened a cereal bar in Times Square in NYC. Today, sister brand Pop-Tarts moved into the space and brought with it a smorgasbord of sweet twists on New York favorites like pizza, cheesecake and burritos.
The Pop-Tarts Café is decorated in bright, colorful chalk art creations of Pop-Tarts’ characters and logo. The menu, developed to entice the brand’s target audience, teens and young adults, offers 20 or so flavors, including several new flavors, and a host of unique creations.
The idea is to get people to think about different use occasions for a product that is normally consumed at breakfast. Thus, the Tarty Taco made with a taco shell stuffed with crumbled cookies and cream to represent ground beef, coconut pieces colored green for lettuce, red jelly beans to resemble tomatoes and other ingredients to make the treat look like a “real” taco.
“It’s a completely sweet Pop-Tarts take on a taco,” says Angela Gusse, director of marketing for Pop-Tarts. “By putting Pop-Tarts in this different context it allows people to think about Pop-Tarts differently.
Like the taco, Pop-Tarts turn up in unexpected places, like small pieces blended into a milk shake or rolled into fresh, sweet crepes with different complementary toppings and called the Pop-Tarts Burrito.
For those of a certain age, the interior space is a throwback to Horn & Hardart’s restaurants with walls of self-serving vending machines. At the Pop-Tarts Café, visitors order items from the menu and receive a buzzer that alerts them when their order is ready. The buzzer also tells them which door at the automat to open to retrieve their food, where they also find a small surprise—a tattoo.
“We want to make sure it’s a delightful experience that teens and young adults will enjoy,” she says.
There is no consumer data collection or coupons to drive people to retail, just a “fun experience here in NYC” for a limited time, Feb. 21 through 26, Gusse says. The #poptartscafé fuels social sharing as does a poster of a character where people can stick their faces through and take pictures. The brand will also be posting on its social channels.
Gusse will crunch “standard stuff” to measure the Pop-Tarts Café effectiveness, like impressions and awareness.
“We wanted everything that we did to be very buzz-worthy and sharable,” she says. “For us its really just having some fun with the brand.”
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