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Esselunga Turns a Single Peach Into a National Conversation
Esselunga's 2023 national TV campaign, The Peach, created by agency SMALL, follows a young girl named Emma who gives her father a peach, letting him believe it came from her mother, in a tender act designed to reconnect her separated parents — reframing the Italian grocery store visit as an expression of love, memory, and family.
Esselunga is Italy's leading grocery store chain. The brand launched The Peach in September 2023 as the opening statement of a new creative platform built around the tagline "Your groceries are more than just groceries," according to clapboard.com and adsoftheworld.com. The campaign consists of a single film, produced by Indiana Production and directed by Rudi Rosenberg, and aired nationally across Italy. It marks a deliberate shift in how the brand communicates its role in Italian daily life, elevating the act of grocery shopping from a functional transaction to a ritual weighted with personal meaning.
The campaign's central proposition, as documented by Little Black Book, is that each item placed in a cart — whether fresh fruit, a cake ingredient, or a bunch of basil — carries a story beyond its price tag. Roberto Selva, Esselunga's chief marketing and customer officer, explained to lbbonline.com that shopping is intended to carry "a much broader symbolic value." By choosing a peach as the campaign's object, Esselunga grounds this idea in something tangible, seasonal, and emotionally resonant. The Peach is positioned not as a product advertisement but as a piece of food storytelling, using the innocence and ingenuity of a child's perspective to surprise and move its audience. In Italy, where food is inseparable from identity and family ritual, that creative choice carries particular cultural weight. The campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
Esselunga operates in one of Europe's most competitive grocery markets. In Italy, major grocery operators recorded combined sales of approximately €109.6 billion in 2023, according to Savills. Within that environment, discount retail was the strongest-growing channel, expanding by approximately 5.8 percent year over year, per the United States Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service. Competitors including Lidl and Conad have built significant share by competing on price and efficiency, which makes Esselunga's decision to compete on emotional meaning rather than cost a strategically distinct move.
Agency SMALL, working under Executive Creative Directors Luca Pannese and Luca Lorenzini, identified a consumer insight that sits beneath the transactional surface of grocery shopping, as reported by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com. Italians do not experience food purchasing as mere provisioning. In Italy, the weekly shop is tied to family roles, seasonal rhythms, and the preparation of meals that mark occasions from ordinary Sundays to celebrations. The Peach activates this latent cultural truth by refusing to show the store, the price, or the product range. Instead it shows what a peach can mean.
The platform "Your groceries are never just groceries," as named by smalltheagency.com, gives Esselunga a long-term creative architecture capable of sustaining multiple executions. The Peach launched this platform in September 2023, and according to smalltheagency.com, the platform extended into 2024, reviving Esselunga's historical tradition of making individual food products the emotional centre of its advertising. That lineage, which traces back through decades of Italian food communication, lends the current campaign both cultural authority and creative credibility in a market where authenticity is a competitive asset.
Director Rudi Rosenberg helmed the film for The Peach, working with Indiana Production in Milan, as confirmed by lbbonline.com and adsoftheworld.com. Rosenberg's direction leans into restraint. The film's power derives not from spectacle but from the precision of a single small gesture observed through the logic of childhood, where a lie told with love is not a lie at all.
Director of Photography Giacomo Frittelli lit the film with a warmth that supports the emotional temperature of the narrative without tipping into sentimentality, per production credits reported by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com. The shoot took place in Milan, grounding the campaign visually within an Italian domestic world that Italian audiences will recognise immediately. Set Designer Fabienne Arzur constructed the film's interiors to feel lived-in rather than aspirational, which is a deliberate creative choice that reinforces the campaign's core argument that ordinary groceries belong to real, complicated, loving family lives.
The production team was led by Executive Producer Karim Bartoletti and Senior Producer Silvia Bergamaschi, with Creative Director Paolo Montanari shaping the work at agency level alongside Managing Director Alberto Scorticati, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. Account Manager Chiara Guadagnini oversaw the client relationship. The result is a film that operates in the tradition of European narrative advertising — a complete short story with a beginning, a complication, and an emotional resolution — rather than a conventional retail TV spot. The peach itself is never sold. It is given, and that distinction is the entire creative idea. In the context of Italian food storytelling, the choice to centre the campaign on a single piece of fresh fruit connects Esselunga's retail identity to something older and more personal than a grocery category claim.
No independently verified performance data for The Peach, such as sales uplift, brand tracking shifts, or media reach figures, is publicly available at the time of writing. No verified award wins at Cannes Lions or equivalent international festivals are documented for this campaign, according to clapboard.com. The campaign recorded 3,291 views and 11 likes on the platform tracked by clapboard.com, figures that reflect the campaign's classification as a single-asset film submission rather than a social-first execution.
Structurally, The Peach demonstrates several characteristics associated with effective long-form retail film. It builds a platform, not a one-off, which extends the brand investment across multiple future executions, as confirmed by smalltheagency.com. It operates without product price claims or promotional mechanics, which protects Esselunga's positioning against discount competitors such as Lidl while speaking directly to consumers who shop on values rather than price. The emotional architecture — a child, a separated family, a piece of fruit as a proxy for love — is simple enough to travel across regions of Italy and precise enough to feel specific rather than generic.
Roberto Selva's public articulation of the campaign's intent, reported by lbbonline.com, signals that Esselunga's leadership views the grocery store not as a commodity venue but as a site of meaning-making. That strategic ambition, embedded in a narrative TV campaign with genuine craft behind it, positions Esselunga to build brand equity in Italy over time even in the absence of short-term promotional pressure. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects competent emotional execution within a well-established genre, with room for the platform to deepen its creative distinctiveness across subsequent chapters.
The Peach is a 2023 national TV campaign for Esselunga created by agency SMALL. It follows a young girl named Emma who gives her father a peach, implying it came from her estranged mother, to reconnect her separated parents. The campaign argues that Italian grocery shopping carries emotional meaning beyond its functional purpose.
Rudi Rosenberg directed The Peach for Esselunga. The film was produced by Indiana Production and shot on location in Milan, with Director of Photography Giacomo Frittelli. Executive Creative Directors Luca Pannese and Luca Lorenzini led the creative work at agency SMALL, as reported by adsoftheworld.com and lbbonline.com.
The tagline is "Your groceries are more than just groceries." It anchors a broader creative platform launched by Esselunga in September 2023, positioning the Italian grocery store chain as a partner in everyday emotional life rather than a transactional retail destination, according to clapboard.com and smalltheagency.com.
SMALL created The Peach for Esselunga. The New York-based agency worked with Executive Creative Directors Luca Pannese and Luca Lorenzini and Creative Director Paolo Montanari. The campaign launched in Italy in September 2023 as the opening execution of Esselunga's new narrative storytelling platform, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com.
No verified award wins for The Peach at Cannes Lions or equivalent international festivals are publicly documented, according to clapboard.com. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting competent emotional craft within Italian food storytelling conventions, with the platform offering scope for stronger creative distinction in future executions.
The Peach opened a long-term creative platform for Esselunga in Italy. According to smalltheagency.com, the platform extended into 2024 and revives the brand's historical tradition of placing individual food products at the emotional centre of its advertising. It positions Esselunga against price-focused competitors by competing on meaning rather than cost.
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