• by Les Luchter , December 12, 2023

From chicken soup to “feel-better” movies to comfort blankets, Reckitt’s Delsym for the second straight cold and flu season acknowledges it takes more than its cough suppressant to bring relief to suffering families.

While chicken soup is often called the “Jewish penicillin” due to its cold-fighting abilities, you won’t find any matzoh balls in Delsym’s Puerto Rican Chicken Soup, the centerpiece of 250 “Comfort Meal Kits” that will be delivered to winners of the brand’s “Bring Comfort Home” sweepstakes, running through Jan. 5. Consumers can enter at https://delsymmealkit.com/.

The Delsym chicken soup recipe  from TV personality and actress La La Anthony, who says it’s her family’s “favorite sick-day meal," features such ingredients as Adobo seasoning, sofrito, sazon seasoning with annatto, chicken bouillon, and noodles.

Those are just some of the nonperishable items that come in the prize, which also includes a $25 DoorDash gift card for perishable ingredients, a pack of five freezer pops for dessert, a soup bowl with spoon, and branded footwear.

Last year, Delsym teamed with its local Boys & Girls Clubs of Union County, New Jersey, to identify 12 families for delivery of a “sick day care package” designed to make families “Feel Better Together.” Each package included Delsym products, along with blankets, a popcorn machine to keep the kids' hunger at bay, an Apple iPad, and a personalized “Feel Better” video from such stars of “feel-better content” as Jodie Sweetin (“Full House”/ “Fuller House”).

The latter was made possible through a tie-in with personalized celebrity video company Cameo, which has been in the news lately as former Congressman George Santo’s new revenue source.

Delsym is currently running a promo where consumers can upload a copy of their receipt for any Delysm product to receive a $6 promo code for streaming a movie on Vudu.

Delsym has based its feel-better cold and flu season promotions on research.

For the past two Octobers, the brand has commissioned nationwide OnePoll surveys of 2,000 U.S. millennial parents of 4- to 12 -ear-olds, finding that most families spend sick days coming together to watch TV and cook comforting meals like soup, but that more then a third brush aside the cooking responsibility “once chaos strikes their household.”

And 40% of respondents said they felt better when “snuggling up with their favorite blanket on the living room couch.”