Silk Soy - SoyTalks Podcast Campaign
How Danone Canada and AndHumanity built the Silk Soy and Activia campaigns around community research, home cooks and nano creators.
In a lot of Canadian homes, what people know about food was handed down long before any brand had a say. For second-generation Chinese Canadians, that might be a parent’s firm view on how doujiang should taste. For many South Asian families, it’s a grandparent’s lesson that yogurt is good for digestion.
Danone Canada leaned into that inherited knowledge this fall with two campaigns built alongside Vancouver-based inclusive marketing agency AndHumanity. SoyTalks, for Silk Soy, is a video podcast where Chinese-Canadian home cooks, creators and an elder sit down to taste and talk through soy dishes. And Activia at Home puts South Asian creators in their own kitchens to show how yogurt already fits into the way their families eat. Before anything was filmed, though, the team went to the communities first.
That meant focus groups, and going in without the answer already decided. “We always try to go into research without any assumptions to keep bias and erasure out of the strategy and to be able to adjust the brief if necessary,” says Tammy Tsang, Co-Founder and Managing Director at AndHumanity.
What came back from Chinese-Canadian participants was clear. Doujiang, the fresh soy milk often served at breakfast, and dounai, the packaged kind, already hold their own place in the kitchen, so Silk Soy had to sit alongside them instead of competing. People got curious when they saw recipes, especially soy-forward dishes, and they put their trust in cooks who show their technique. They also wanted an elder at the table and room for some humour, which pushed the brief toward cooking and conversation instead of an ad.
Intergenerational moments at home landed hardest in the Activia groups, like families cooking together and the small rituals of everyday meals. Participants responded to content that blends heritage with everyday Canadian life, and to creators with a genuine relationship with food.
With that connection showing up so clearly in the research, both advertising plans turned into community-led content. For Silk, that meant a roundtable in place of an out-of-home buy, a menu that stretched past drinks into savoury dishes and desserts, and a presence that isn’t tied to the holidays. Activia at Home went to nano and micro creators from the community, and AndHumanity released their content in two waves instead of all at once, so each creator’s post had space to be seen.
Three Anchors, No Script
The SoyTalks cast had only three anchors to work with: soy’s long place in Chinese culture, how Silk Soy fits the way people cook today, and soy as the hero of the dish. The rest was up to them, and they filled it with their own stories about ingredients that have long been part of their lives.
Cooks brought their own recipes, and questions were paired with dishes. The full talking points stayed private, so cast members heard each other’s stories for the first time on camera. “That freedom is how the table ended up in a lively conversation, including humorous discussions about the different kinds of egg tarts and everyone’s own preferences, which no script would have produced,” Tsang says.
The cast pairs host Yvonne Chung, a Chinese-Canadian comedian, with home cook and influencer Jacky Kwok and his mother, Edith, alongside food creator Kirsty Ip and personality Hostion Ho. The recipes include a Black Sesame Horchata Matcha Latte, a new take on Mapo Tofu and a Silk Soy hot pot base. Long-form episodes run on Silk Canada’s YouTube channel, with short cut-downs and step-by-step recipe content alongside. A national paid plan through WPP Wavemaker supports it on Meta and YouTube, and a second wave of content went live on October 29.
Trust Over Reach
“People trust people they know,” Tsang says of the decision to work with smaller creators on Activia at Home. Nano and micro creators have close, engaged communities and share from their own kitchens, while WPP’s paid media does the work of reaching new audiences. The roster of nine spans generations, regions and formats, from family recipes to cultural traditions, and includes A Couple Bites (Branavan Siva), the most recent creator to go live. Across the content, Activia gets blended or whipped into raita, smoothies, lassi and chaas.
What the Comments Say
As of October 21, SoyTalks had passed 800,000 plays across five Instagram posts, counting paid and organic together. On one recipe post, more than 100 people commented “SOY” to get the recipe. Other posts drew direct recipe requests, plus comments from people who plan to cook with Silk Soy, have already made a dish or keep it at home. AndHumanity hasn’t shared numbers for Activia at Home yet. It points instead to the comment sections, where people are swapping family food memories and several say they’d like to try the product.
Canadian audiences have shown they notice when a brand treats a cultural staple as a trend to fix, and Tsang says the problem usually starts well before anything reaches the screen. “Brands assume inclusion is what’s on screen, but it’s decided earlier in the research, strategy and planning. Each step where erasure creeps in whittles inclusion down to imagery.” On SoyTalks, the decisions that mattered came before casting, around how Silk sits next to traditions people already love and who counts as credible, while on Activia they came down to who speaks and how the releases are paced.
