Danone wins Reggie Silver for Home’Rista program

How Danone turned at-home coffee into a full-funnel growth platform

As competition in refrigerated coffee intensified, Danone needed to do more than promote individual products. The category was crowding, and consumers had more options than ever.

Danone had the portfolio to compete across the at-home coffee occasion with International Delight creamers, STōK Cold Brew, Silk, Dunkin’ creamers, and cold foams. But the opportunity was not just getting consumers to buy one more product. It was helping them understand how those products worked together.

In partnership with Flywheel, the result was Home’Rista, a full-funnel campaign that reframed Danone’s coffee portfolio as a simple, confidence-building system for making café-quality drinks at home.

The work earned Reggie Silver for Best Full Funnel Campaign, recognizing a program that used consumer insight, creator education, retail activation, and portfolio strategy to drive growth in a declining category.

The challenge: protect and grow share in a crowded coffee category

The refrigerated coffee category was becoming more competitive. New cold foam launches and broader coffee innovation were giving consumers more ways to build café-inspired drinks at home. Danone needed a campaign that could:

• Protect and grow its refrigerated coffee portfolio

• Differentiate its brands from emerging competitors

• Drive multi-product basket building

• Help consumers see Danone products as part of one connected coffee routine

• Turn at-home coffee from a product choice into a behavior

The challenge was creating a stronger reason for consumers to choose Danone’s portfolio and keep coming back.

The insight: the barrier was confidence, not product availability

Our research showed that many consumers wanted café-quality coffee at home, but did not believe they could make it themselves. Among Gen Z and Millennial consumers, 71% believed skilled baristas were required to make quality coffee, and only 27% rated their homemade coffee attempts as “excellent.”

That created a clear tension. Consumers were moving between expensive coffeehouse visits and disappointing at-home attempts. They had the aspiration, but not the confidence. That gap became the strategic opportunity. Instead of focusing only on the finished drink, Danone could focus on the person making it. If the brand could help consumers feel capable, it could elevate the entire portfolio.

The strategy: turn Danone’s portfolio into a foolproof at-home coffee system

Flywheel helped Danone translate the consumer confidence gap into a simple, ownable portfolio strategy: Pour. Add. Top.

• Pour coffee

• Add creamer

• Top with cold foam

That three-step system made the at-home coffee experience feel easy, customizable, and achievable. It also gave each brand a clear role in the routine, helping consumers understand how STōK Cold Brew, International Delight, Silk, Dunkin’ creamers, and cold foams could work together in one basket. With Flywheel’s support, Danone moved from promoting a set of individual SKUs to building a connected consumer behavior that could drive portfolio engagement and repeat purchase.

The solution: show, surround, shift, and sustain

Flywheel and Danone brought the campaign to life through a full-funnel activation strategy designed to teach, inspire, convert, and sustain behavior over time.

Show: use creators as skill builders

Flywheel helped Danone enlist 16 influencers to demonstrate how easy it could be to make café-quality coffee at home. The creators were teachers and confidence builders, not just product pushers, showing consumers the simple 1-2-3 process and proving that the Home’Rista routine was easy to recreate.

This helped the campaign turn education into inspiration and made the product ecosystem feel approachable.

Surround: create a unified retail experience

Flywheel helped orchestrate the campaign across 28 retailers, connecting in-store displays, signage, retail media, and retailer-specific activations into one consistent Home’Rista story.

That orchestration helped reinforce the same narrative across touchpoints: Danone’s coffee portfolio made at-home coffee easier, better, and more customizable.

At Kroger, experiential activations helped move consumers from inspiration to action by connecting the Home’Rista idea directly to the store environment.

Shift: drive trial through sampling and targeted media

Danone also activated a four-city sampling tour at Walmart stores, bringing the Home’Rista experience into real life.

Flywheel supported the connection between audience strategy, retailer activation, and conversion by helping translate the campaign idea into shoppable touchpoints across key retailers. At Walmart, the program connected awareness, trial, and purchase through targeted media and retail activation.

Sustain: make portfolio adoption the retention engine

By helping consumers build the full routine, Danone created a halo effect across its coffee brands. Each product had a role, and the more consumers adopted the system, the more value the portfolio could create over time.

The results: growth in a declining category

Home’Rista delivered impact across awareness, engagement, conversion, and share.

The creator strategy generated 641 million impressions with a 16.83% engagement rate, performing at 8x the industry benchmark. Retail activations also drove meaningful conversion, an incremental lift in sales, and multi-brand halo sales. Overall, 51K new-to-brand consumers were acquired.

Most importantly, the campaign helped Danone grow despite category pressure. Danone ahcieved a market lift in a declining category.

For Danone and Flywheel, the results validated a clear strategic bet: when consumer education, portfolio strategy, retail activation, and measurement work together, a campaign can change how consumers engage with a category in the long-term.

The bigger takeaway

Growth in a crowded category does not always come from shouting louder about individual products. Sometimes it comes from helping consumers feel more capable.

With Home’Rista, Danone and Flywheel turned a portfolio of coffee products into a platform for behavior change. The campaign helped consumers bridge the gap between aspiration and ability, while helping Danone build baskets, drive engagement, and capture share in a challenging category.