Cajun cooking experience brand launches with international acclaim

client

Spuddy Cajun Cooking Experience

services

Branding

Date

2019

Challenge

Spuddy’s Cajun Foods is located in rural Louisiana and had been in business for over 20 years. Traffic patterns in the town changed in the Summer of 2019 due to a barge hitting, and subsequently closing the closest bridge over the Mississippi River. To combat the change in traffic Spuddy decided he needed to focus more on people visiting the area and less on the day-to-day local restaurant traffic. He decided to re-brand his restaurant and open a cooking school. The new brand needed to work for both the restaurant and cooking school. In addition to the creative elements, Spuddy needed help fully conceptualizing the cooking experience and presenting it to visitors. Spuddy asked Bandwagon to help create a new tourism attration brand.

Reception

Within the first 60 days of launching the new brand, Spuddy had bookings from the local area and several foreign countries.

The new brand also caught the attention of travel media. Multiple publications, video bloggers, and digital influencers have covered Spuddy’s new cooking experience. To date, Bandwagon has secured a total of $75,000 in earned media placements for the experience.

Since Bandwagon began working with Spuddy, he has seen his business grow and has been invited to Europe, Atlanta, Charleston, and several other locations to conduct live Cajun cooking demonstrations.

Based on Bandwagon’s promotional efforts, several local tour operators contacted Spuddy with interest in offering Spuddy’s Cajun Cooking Experience as part of their group tours. The first two large group demonstrations had over 260 total guests. The Bandwagon team assisted Spuddy with planning how to translate his experience to the large group and helped him select cameras and monitors to maximize the visitor experience.

Spuddy projects that group tours will become a large portion of his cooking experience and is currently
making plans to market to more tour operators with the help of the Bandwagon team.

Based on feedback from the Bandwagon Team and an overwhelming response from the public, Spuddy is also working to be able to ship his Andouille sausage nationwide.