Carrefour dives into the world of Fortnite

Carrefour has created a virtual map in the hugely popular video game Fortnite. By doing so, the retailer wants to make young people aware of its Act Ford Food programme and encourage them to eat healthier.

Healthy map

A map, a hundred players armed to the teeth who are let loose in it, and at the end only one remains: that is, in a nutshell, the recipe for Fortnite, a video game that was launched in 2017 by Epic Games and quickly became an insane success. The game earned the publisher a whopping 9 billion dollars (7.6 billion euros) in revenue in the first two years after its launch.

Carrefour has now created a ‘Healthy Map’ to bring its Act For Food programme to the attention of young people. “Young people are a difficult target group to reach,” Olivier Garcia, director of non-food e-commerce at Carrefour Group told Républik Retail. “However, Fortnite is a real hit with them and we are also the third largest sales network for video games and consoles. There is a creative option in the game, and we decided to seize it.”

Eating fruit and vegetables

Carrefour’s teams worked with Publicis and creative studio MakaMakes for about a month to create their virtual map, which depicts the world of the responsible supermarket of the future, with biogas trucks, windmills, vegetable gardens and farms. “We took the realism very far,” says Garcia.

During the game, players can regain ‘life points’ and thus increase their chances of winning by eating fruit, vegetables and fish. They access the map by entering a code. To publicise the whole project, Carrefour partnered with influencer Teeqzy, whose community has more than 700,000 subscribers on Twitch, the social network for gamers.

The supermarket chain also wants to expand the operation to other countries such as Belgium and Spain. Garcia is even thinking of a country competition to give the game an extra dimension.