• by Erik Oster , September 6, 2023

Recognizing that many people scramble around in the mornings and wind up just settling for whatever they can grab quickly to eat, Kraft-Heinz’s Oscar Mayer brand is entering the refrigerated prepared breakfast category with its new Scramblers offerings.

The line of convenient breakfast products are all built around a base of two fresh eggs, developed on the insight that 23% of people say they aren’t eating a full breakfast due to a lack of hearty options available, according to a 2021 IRI survey.

“While people crave a tasty breakfast, it is often compromised with quick, boring options due to busy weekday mornings — and boring is the antithesis of what Oscar Mayer stands for,” said Kelsey Rice, Oscar Mayer associate director.

The line also brings together different popular Oscar Mayer staples in one meal for the first time.

Oscar Mayer Scramblers come in three varieties, which build on the core egg base with additions of potatoes, meat and cheese: Bacon & Velveeta, Ham & Colby Jack, and Wiener & Cheddar.

Scramblers will roll out across retailers nationwide this month, priced at $2.75 per cup – a cost which may be a compelling selling point for consumers strapped for cash as well as time as they seek ways to cut down on costs while dealing with the cost of living increases.

To promote the new offering, Oscar Mayer is launching a “Scramble Your Morning” campaign across channels including TV, streaming video, online video, and social media.

Designed to give consumers a wake-up call about their new breakfast options, the campaign leans on stylized copy and the brand’s vibrant red and blue color palette, introducing the line by scrambling up letters to present viewers with brain teasers designed to bring some fun to morning routines. Think: word scrambles, but more obvious.

There’s also an OOH campaign in Chicago and a “custom microsite experience” from Scramblers URLs. Oscar Mayer worked with creative agency partner Johannes Leonardo to develop the campaign, along with Publicis Groupe’s Starcom’s P57 on U.S. media and The Kitchen on social media components.

“Mornings can be a blur. We wanted to bring a little bit of fun to the scramble by intercepting people during their morning routine and providing them with that quick hit of joy that your brain gives you when you unscramble seemingly unscramble-able sentences,” Johannes Leonardo Group Creative Director Nathan Frank said.

“Our copywriting team has developed a formidable muscle for misspelling words in a way that is 100% wrong but also 100% legible.”

While the Oscar Mayer brand is new to the refrigerated breakfast category, parent company Kraft-Heinz is not – with the company claiming in a statement that it “pioneered” the category in 2018, the year the company introduced its Just Crack an Egg brand, and continues to see it as an area with opportunity for future growth.