Nestlé
Abuelita Hot Chocolate
Turning a seasonal collectible into a story about grandparents
Freelance Strategic Accounts Lead
Wunderman Thompson (now VML)
Brand & Campaign
The Problem Worth Solving
Chocolate Abuelita has released limited-edition decorated cups for Day of the Dead for years, and people had started collecting them. That was good news and a problem at the same time. The cups were popular enough on their own that the brand risked becoming background to its own packaging: pretty objects people wanted, with nothing underneath connecting them back to why Abuelita matters to Mexican families in the first place.
The Insight That Unlocked It
Abuelita isn't just a hot chocolate brand. The name means "little grandmother", and the brand has spent decades sitting at the centre of a very specific Mexican domestic ritual: the grandmother who makes hot chocolate, the recipe and the gesture passed down rather than taught. Day of the Dead is itself a celebration of remembering and honouring family who came before. The two ideas were already pointing at the same thing. The brief wasn't to design a nicer cup. It was to make the cup the entry point into a story about why grandparents, tradition and Abuelita all sit in the same emotional place for people.
What I Did
Identified grandparents as the connecting thread between the brand's heritage, the Day of the Dead occasion, and the emotional reason people were already collecting the cups
Built the campaign narrative around the idea that grandparents are the ones who keep traditions and rituals alive across generations, and that Abuelita's role in the home does the same thing in miniature
Shaped the tone around warmth, respeto and family legacy rather than novelty or collectability, so the cups had meaning attached to them rather than simply being limited-edition objects
Worked the comparison between Abuelita and grandparents themselves (both associated with warmth, with home, with a kind of comfort that's more than just taste) into the heart of the storytelling
The Idea It Became
Abuelita and grandparents have something in common: they both mean warmth and home. The campaign made that comparison explicit, tying the new cup designs to the idea that drinking Abuelita is its own small act of remembering, the same way Day of the Dead asks people to remember the family members who shaped them.
What Happened
The limited-edition cups sold out by the second week of launch. Beyond the immediate sell-through, the campaign reinforced Abuelita's positioning as a brand genuinely tied to Mexican heritage and family tradition, rather than one borrowing the occasion for a seasonal product drop.
