Building off a recent shift in its brand messaging to target a younger demographic, Jack Astor’s has released a new campaign that applies this approach to spotlighting its high standards in the kitchen.

The “Annoyingly High Food Standards” campaign, developed by Toronto-based agency The Garden, sees real workers from the restaurant brand’s own kitchens talking about the amount of work that goes into the dishes they make. 

Anesie Johnson, VP of marketing at Jack Astor’s parent company SIR Corp, says the brand wanted to offer a look behind the curtain to show people the “shocking” amount of effort and time that goes into making the brand’s food from scratch in-house.

“We had the opportunity to pitch the [campaign] concept internally at our spring conference to all our internal general managers and kitchen managers, and there became this overwhelming rallying cry of how amazing it would be to actually get into our kitchens and show people what we do on a daily basis,” Johnson says.

She adds that “typical restaurant advertising is all kind of the same. They show overly stylized food and beer being poured, and we wanted to do something completely different, because none of those messages were really working to attract a younger audience.”

The inspiration for the creative was partly due to popular U.S. TV series The Bear, which features a young chef from the fine dining world returning home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop. The success of this series demonstrated to the brand that young people want something that’s relatable, real and honest, Johnson says. 

The shift to speak to a younger audience came following decline in late-night sales, which the brand chalked up to fewer younger people dining at Jack Astor’s restaurants during the COVID pandemic. So the brand tweaked its identity, Johnson says, re-evaluating its food program, messaging and even the physical design of its restaurants.

“Restaurants can get caught in this sea of sameness advertising where you go after price promotions or you talk about how great your food is, and everybody has great food and beverages now,” says Johnson. “Let’s just get away from trying to do a price promotion, which is really just a race to the bottom, and focus on the behind-the-scenes look of what’s happening in our kitchen every day.”

To further the campaign’s authentic approach, it casts and quotes Jack Astor’s kitchen employees rather than professional actors. Many of the copy used in the campaign’s creative are taken verbatim from interviews The Garden conducted with kitchen staff members.

Jack Astor’s also invited content creators into its kitchens to work with its chefs. Johnson says that while it may seem counterintuitive to the campaign’s authentic nature to bring in content creators, it helped with efforts to reach its younger target audience.

“This was not about having somebody take pictures of themselves eating our food or visiting our restaurant with their friends and having a great occasion,” Johnson says. 

“We wanted to find the right content creators that could actually spend a day in the life of a Jack chef. So we picked these people that were not afraid to get their hands dirty… they basically spent a day completing a training shift at Jack’s, where they were making our actual food. And that felt a lot more authentic than having them just eat great food and drinks.”

Campaign spots can be seen on digital channels via platforms like Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. The creative will be in market from Jan. 15 to Feb. 24. Cairns Oneil handled the media buy for the campaign, while Hype PR connected the brand with content creators.