Dentyne Follow Food Truck Takes Fresh Breath to America's Food Festival Scene
Dentyne's Follow Food campaign is a 2015 outdoor and experiential activation by McCann New York that sent a branded fresh-breath truck across the United States to intercept food truck culture at the country's most popular food festivals, using the social hashtag #FollowFood to connect breath-freshening gum directly to bold flavour consumption.
The campaign launched in June 2015 and built on a preceding social phase centred on the hashtag #FollowFood. Where the social layer established a conversational tone online, the summer activation gave that conversation a physical presence. The Follow Food Truck travelled from Texas and Tennessee through to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., appearing at food festivals and conventions where adventurous eating and potent flavours were the main event. The strategic logic was deliberate: position Dentyne not as a corrective afterthought but as an indispensable companion to any serious food experience across the United States.
The campaign sits within the Health industry classification and was executed through OOH and outdoor media, complemented by experiential touchpoints that made the Follow Food Truck itself the primary advertising unit. Dentyne's characterisation of the truck as a cheerfully cheeky nod to foodie culture is precise: it acknowledged the food truck moment saturating American urban life rather than competing against it, inventing a new category — the breath-freshening truck — that existed only because the food truck boom demanded one. The Clapboard Score for Follow Food is 68 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes a coherent cultural insight with solid craft but stops short of the measurable consumer behaviour shift that would elevate it further.
Dentyne entered the Follow Food campaign against a measurably softening United States gum market. According to Statista, total US gum sales fell approximately 1.06 percent year over year to around 3.1 billion dollars for the 52 weeks ending April 19, 2015, while sugar-free gum sales declined approximately 1.80 percent to around 2.6 billion dollars over the same period. In that environment, sustaining relevance with younger, food-engaged consumers required Dentyne to move beyond traditional breath-freshening messaging and find genuine cultural territory.
The food truck movement in the United States provided exactly that territory. Food trucks had evolved from street-corner convenience into a marker of culinary identity, drawing consumers who self-identified as adventurous eaters and who were active on social platforms documenting their discoveries. By deploying the Follow Food Truck at festivals in Texas, Tennessee, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as reported by Trendhunter and adsspot.me, Dentyne placed itself inside a consumption ritual rather than alongside it. The insight driving this placement is fundamental: the same qualities that make food exciting — intensity of flavour, spice, richness — are the qualities that most reliably create the need for breath-freshening gum.
Dentyne's principal competitors in the United States sugar-free gum segment include Wrigley's Extra and Trident, both of which maintained category presence through retail-led advertising in 2015. Neither brand pursued the experiential food-culture angle that Dentyne activated with Follow Food, leaving an uncontested lane in which Dentyne's truck could operate as a cultural participant rather than a media interrupter. The campaign extended what chiefmarketer.com documents as Dentyne's long-running brand equity — fresh breath as social confidence and permission for closeness — into the specific idiom of American foodie culture, keeping that equity alive and growing its cultural surface area during a category downturn.
Director Joey Garfield of Ghost Robot led the production that brought the Follow Food campaign to life on screen, working from creative direction established by Dave Waraksa as Creative Director at McCann New York. The campaign's chief creative officers were Tom Murphy and Sean Bryan, whose oversight shaped a tone that was self-aware without being self-congratulatory — a difficult register for a confectionery brand to hold at an outdoor and experiential scale.
Junior copywriter Molly Wilkof and junior art director Alex Cherkasov contributed to the campaign's executional identity, with integrated production managed by Chandler Simms under chief production officer Nathy Aviram, all at McCann New York. The account was guided by group account directors Dina Hovanessian and Lauren LaValle, with account executive Sarah Crossland supporting delivery. The depth of this team structure — seniors and juniors working in direct collaboration — reflects the ambition of a campaign that had to function simultaneously as a social media property, a physical experiential unit, and an outdoor advertising platform.
The creative decision to build the Follow Food Truck as the central medium rather than a supporting stunt is the most consequential craft choice in the campaign. The truck did not advertise Dentyne from a distance; it was Dentyne, travelling under its own power to find its consumer at the moment of maximum relevance — immediately after a flavour-forward meal at a food festival. As noted by Trendhunter, the activation positioned Dentyne's fresh-breath proposition as a cheerful, knowing accompaniment to food culture rather than a corrective product. The OOH component in key United States festival markets ensured that Follow Food maintained presence beyond the truck's footprint, reinforcing the #FollowFood hashtag and extending the campaign's reach across each city stop.
No independently verified performance data for the Follow Food campaign — such as impression counts, gum sales uplift, or social reach figures — is publicly available from named third-party sources. What the structure of the campaign does make measurable is its reach logic. The Follow Food Truck visited food festivals across Texas, Tennessee, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as documented by Trendhunter and adsspot.me, meaning Dentyne activated in several of the United States' highest-footfall outdoor food events during peak summer season.
The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on three reinforcing layers. The social phase using #FollowFood established audience expectation and brand vocabulary before the truck appeared. The experiential truck then delivered a high-dwell-time, product-adjacent brand moment at food festivals where consumers were primed to think about flavour and its aftermath. The OOH outdoor media extended that message to passers-by in each market, ensuring the campaign communicated to both the festival attendees it reached directly and the broader United States consumers in each city. This three-layer architecture — social seeding, live experiential, outdoor amplification — reflects a campaign built for genuine multiplier effect rather than a single-channel spend.
The Clapboard Score of 68 out of 100 acknowledges the coherence of the cultural insight and the operational ambition of a multi-city food festival tour in the United States, while reflecting that the absence of documented outcome data limits the assessment of actual consumer impact. As chiefmarketer.com records, Dentyne's brand history of connecting fresh breath to social permission and closeness gave Follow Food a durable foundation; the 2015 campaign successfully transported that equity into food culture without diluting it.
Dentyne's Follow Food campaign is a 2015 outdoor and experiential activation by McCann New York. It deployed a branded Follow Food Truck across United States food festivals from Texas to Washington, D.C., using the hashtag #FollowFood to connect Dentyne's breath-freshening gum with America's food truck and food festival culture during summer 2015.
McCann New York created the Follow Food campaign for Dentyne in 2015. The team included chief creative officers Tom Murphy and Sean Bryan, creative director Dave Waraksa, junior copywriter Molly Wilkof, junior art director Alex Cherkasov, and director Joey Garfield of production company Ghost Robot, as documented by Clapboard.
The Dentyne Follow Food Truck travelled to food festivals and conventions across the United States. Reported destinations included Texas, Tennessee, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as documented by Trendhunter and adsspot.me. The truck targeted high-footfall outdoor food events during peak summer 2015 to reach adventurous eaters at the moment of maximum flavour consumption.
Dentyne launched Follow Food during a declining United States gum market. According to Statista, total US gum sales fell approximately 1.06 percent year over year to around 3.1 billion dollars for the 52 weeks ending April 19, 2015. The campaign targeted food-engaged younger consumers to sustain brand relevance during that category softening.
Dentyne's Follow Food campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 68 out of 100. The score reflects a coherent cultural insight and strong multi-city experiential execution across the United States, offset by the absence of publicly documented performance metrics that would confirm measurable consumer behaviour impact following the summer 2015 food festival tour.
Follow Food transported Dentyne's long-standing brand equity — fresh breath as social confidence and permission for closeness — into American food culture. As documented by chiefmarketer.com, Dentyne had built this equity through earlier campaigns including the 2011 Safe Breath Alliance. Follow Food updated that positioning for 2015 by anchoring it to food truck and food festival culture across the United States.
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