Northbrook's Barilla teams up with Ingrid Hoffman in Latino marketing campaign
Barilla, which houses it U.S. headquarters in Northbrook, recently launched a Latin American marketing strategy with a partnership with television personality and restaurateur Ingrid Hoffman.
The partnership is part of Barilla's campaign, Latino Italian Fusion. The Parma, Italy, based pasta company is expanding aggressively into Latin America.
"Our main target for the Latino Italian Fusion campaign is Latina moms who take pride in cooking a healthy and satisfying meal for their families," Melissa Tendick, VP of Marketing at Barilla Group, told Portada, a New York-based Latin American media firm.
"Our marketing mix continues to evolve as digital is - and always will be - at the core of our consumer's lives. It is ingrained in how they shop, where they find and share recipe inspiration, and where they search for new information about our products so it is important for us to be there at each stage along the journey," Tendick said.
Barilla believes Hoffman, raised in Colombia and Curacao, a small Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, is the ideal choice for the campaign.
"She is not only a household name in the Hispanic community but her crossover appeal as a culinary figure made her the perfect choice to bridge the fusion of two different cuisines," Tendick said. "Working in collaboration with Ingrid, we created four videos showcasing unique meals solutions using Latin-inspired flavors with traditional pasta ingredients. We decided to place them on siempremujer.com because we know that this is a destination for Hispanics, primarily Latinas, searching for recipes and cooking tips that are in-culture and in-language."
Meanwhile, Hoffman said in a statement that she is "excited to be a part of Latino Italian Fusion because it's a movement that inspires Latinas to be creative with a pantry staple like pasta while remaining true to the ingredients, spices, and flavor combinations they already know and love. Barilla has a variety of pasta shapes to choose from making it super simple for Latinas to create unique pasta dishes whether they are traditional or reinvented, any night of the week."
Inspired by the diversity of Latin cuisine, Barilla is collaborating with other Latino chefs to develop a roster of Latin-inspired pasta dishes exclusively for Latino Italian Fusion that captures the flavors of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Barilla started in Parma in 1877 out of a shop that made bread and pasta. Today Barilla is a world leader in the pasta and pasta sauce businesses in continental Europe, bakery products in Italy and the crispbread business in Scandinavia. The company owns 30 production sites (14 in Italy and 16 abroad) and exports to more than 100 countries. Every year, its plants turn out around 1,700,000 tons of food products.
Barilla recently relocated its Americas headquarters from Bannockburn to Northbrook.
Roughly 150 employees transferred to the 75,000 square-foot Northbrook office facility at 885 Sunset Ridge. Barilla's new home was formerly occupied by Nestle USA's frozen pizza division, which moved to a Cleveland suburb.