M&M Food Market is looking to upend perceptions of its brand among Millennials by showing off the impromptu and informal at-home meals that can be created with its selection of prepared and frozen foods.

“There’s No Restaurant Like Home” showcases how entire meals can be made using M&M’s selection, be it a “feast for two” made entirely of appetizers, or a big barbecue where the store’s burgers are topped with its sides.

The campaign work is meant to more accurately embrace how people actually eat, cook and serve dinner at home, without any judgement. Anthony Atkinson, ECD at M&M’s creative agency Cossette, says it wanted to showcase how making meals yourself out of prepared food still offered opportunities for creativity.

Atkinson tells strategy the brief was to get Millennials to reappraise the M&M brand, which – even following a 2016 rebranding and packaging overhaul – is often regarded as “their parents’ store.”

It is doing so through occasion-driven storytelling, inspired by habits and life stages. But it is also embracing what might be considered “imperfect” meals: different arrays of foods that aren’t common pairings, that aren’t served in a three-course style and aren’t made from scratch. And it is being presented in a way that gives customers the freedom to enjoy these kinds of meal occasions, in a way they might not be able to with a traditional restaurant meal.

“That word ‘unapologetic’ dictated a lot of the creative decisions,” Atkinson notes.

The campaign is running in a combination of online video, digital OOH and organic social media to entice food lovers. M&M’s last round of advertising was a mix of TV and OLV, and it has increasingly found success with the latter, Atkinson explains. Initiative is handling media, except for paid social, which is being led by Reshift.

The appetite appeal shots are inspired by the works of noted food and documentary photographer Martin Parr, merging documentary and advertising techniques to end up with creative that is raw, with unique and unorthodox angles.

“We really leaned into that aesthetic,” he says. That came down to the food styling too, unafraid and unapologetic about being a bit messy, going against conventions about appetite appeal.