Turning 4 Freezer Aisle Underdogs into Category Climbers

Summary: We turned Ajinomoto’s four low-awareness frozen food brands into distinct, fast-growing players by carving unique positions and targeting precise audiences on lean budgets.

When Ajinomoto Foods North America tapped us as their agency-of-record, they didn’t hand us one frozen food brand to supercharge—they dropped four in our lap: José Olé, Ling Ling, Tai Pei, and namesake Ajinomoto. Three had been around for decades yet still acted like scrappy start-ups—good distribution, microscopic user bases. How small? José Olé had under 8 million users, and one brand limped in with fewer than a million. Then there was Ajinomoto—the 100+ year-old Japanese powerhouse that once gave Dentsu office space to get on its feet—yet in the U.S., it faced the same problem: nobody really knew it.

Across the board, awareness was abysmal. And these weren’t just any frozen foods—they all lived in the hot snack/hot entrée aisle, battling giants like Totino’s, Marie Callender’s, Stouffer’s, and Hot Pockets. In a category of 119 million total users, the heavy-hitters commanded 15 million or more. Our four? Mere blips. To make matters worse, the three Asian brands all offered nearly identical lineups—potstickers, rice, noodles, egg rolls—and, frankly, looked and sounded interchangeable. Different packaging, same everything else.

We knew “just advertise more” wouldn’t cut it. Our first move: run each brand through our 5-C process—consumer, category, culture, competition, company—to uncover the white space and blue-ocean opportunities others missed. This became the blueprint for everything: audience targeting, media planning, and creative strategy. But for the three Asian brands, we had to go deeper—creating clear, defensible “swim lanes” for each so they wouldn’t cannibalize each other’s message or media spend. With category leaders outspending us many times over, precision was our only option.

The payoff? Four brands. Four distinct target audiences. Four unique positions built to spark relevance, create esteem, and drive growth without tripping over each other. User bases and sales climbed across the board, proving that with the right strategy, even molehills can become mountains—sometimes, entire mountain ranges. See our recent work on Ajinomoto Gyoza launch, HERE.