Recipe for Change
Recipes as IP: with retail gone, 96 restaurants turned a Ramadan meal into a remittance for displaced Lebanese women.
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AI Translation Summary
When 2024's war destroyed Puck's distribution in Lebanon, the brand licensed unemployed Lebanese women's recipes as intellectual property to 96 restaurants across 28 cities via Arla Professional, splitting revenue 50:50. A QR code on each plate linked the diner to the woman behind the recipe. Timed to Ramadan, dining out became an act of solidarity.
Cultural Context
Puck is a Middle East dairy brand owned by Arla. Ramadan centers on the communal post-sunset iftar meal, which anchors the campaign's 'dining as solidarity' idea, and the 'diaspora' refers to Lebanese communities living abroad.
Entry Information
Summary
Recipe for Change: Puck's Ramadan Innovation In 2024, war in Lebanon dismantled Puck's commercial infrastructure. Selfless Shelves, the 2023 initiative supporting unemployed Lebanese women, became impossible to operate. Puck entered Ramadan 2025 with no shelves, no distribution, no stock. Recipe for Change licensed these recipes as intellectual property to 96 restaurants across 28 cities through Arla Professional's network, with 50:50 revenue sharing. Timed to Ramadan, dining became solidarity. In 2026, the programme expanded with a digital platform in development.
Strategy
The behaviour breakthrough that inspired the work was observed, not inferred. The conventional assumption in a crisis marketing context is that audiences want to feel they have helped. Recipe for Change tested a different hypothesis: that the Lebanese diaspora, in particular, did not want to feel they had helped. The impact of that behaviour was direct and traceable: a QR code on the plate linked the diner to the specific woman whose recipe they had just eaten, with a transparent account of how the revenue was shared. The result was a behaviour that had not previously existed: using a restaurant visit as a remittance.
Execution
At the top, Anthony Rahayel's culinary influencer platform reached Lebanese communities worldwide, including the diaspora audiences most emotionally invested in the crisis and most likely to act on what they saw. The films he helped produce were not branded content in the conventional sense. At the restaurant level, the programme created a second earned media layer: 96 partners across 28 cities, each with their own audiences, each activated around the Ramadan special. QR codes linking dishes to personal stories extended engagement beyond the table and onto screens. At the brand level, the campaign's cultural resonance generated press coverage and social conversation far beyond what a paid media budget of this scale would typically produce.
Results
By bringing 96 restaurants into the programme through Arla Professional's network, the initiative activated a distribution model that bypassed the collapsed retail infrastructure entirely. It was a direct commercial outcome of the strategic idea. The second revenue stream was the women's income. Under the 50:50 revenue sharing model, each dish sold generated a direct payment to the woman whose recipe it was. It was a commercial royalty, earned through intellectual property, which is an important distinction for both the dignity of the participants and the scalability of the model. Over 350 new restaurant enquiries from cities across Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania followed, representing a strong pipeline for the programme's second year.