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IGA Tough Cookies Turns Pediatric Cancer Support Into a Video Game
IGA's 2022 Tough Cookies campaign is a Canadian cause-marketing initiative created by Sid Lee that fundraises for Fondation Charles-Bruneau's pediatric cancer research mission by inviting shoppers to purchase temporary tattoos designed by children receiving cancer care, with each purchase unlocking access to an original co-created online video game.
The 2022 edition marks the third consecutive iteration of the Tough Cookies partnership between IGA, Sid Lee, and Fondation Charles-Bruneau, according to Sid Lee's own documentation. Each preceding edition deepened the experiential mechanics of the campaign, with earlier editions deploying augmented reality to animate the tattoo designs, as reported by Campaign Canada. In 2022, Sid Lee expanded the experience into a fully realised online video game, raising the creative ambition of the fundraising format considerably.
The campaign launched in June 2022 across Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada, with tattoos available through IGA stores until June 22, 2022. The mechanic was straightforward in concept but rich in execution: four tattoo designs, each conceived by children who had received care at a Charles-Bruneau facility, served as the physical gateway to the digital experience. Children did not merely inspire the work — they shaped its creative content, contributing both the tattoo illustrations and the missions embedded within the game itself.
The game unfolds inside a magical world inhabited by five personified tastes — Sweet, Salty, Bitter, Sour, and Umami. The central antagonist, Umami, consumed by resentment at being underappreciated, declares war on the other tastes. Players take on the role of protector, tasked with restoring harmony to the world of flavours. The narrative premise is not arbitrary whimsy: it draws directly from a documented side effect of cancer treatment, in which patients experience the loss or alteration of taste perception. The game transforms a clinical reality into a playable metaphor, grounding the fantasy in genuine childhood experience. IGA carries a Clapboard Score of 73/100 for this campaign, reflecting strong creative and strategic integration across its fundraising, gaming, and cause-led objectives.
IGA operates as a banner of Sobeys Inc., itself part of Empire Company Limited, as confirmed by Sid Lee's campaign documentation. This positioning places IGA in direct competition with Loblaw Companies, which held approximately 28 to 29 percent of Canadian grocery market share in the 2021 to 2022 period according to the Competition Bureau of Canada, and with Metro Inc., another major Quebec-based operator. In an environment where five major Canadian grocery operators together accounted for approximately 74 to 76 percent of grocery retail sales around that same period, as reported by CBC News, differentiation through values-based marketing carries real strategic weight.
The Tough Cookies campaign responds to a consumer landscape in which brand purpose increasingly influences purchase decisions. Rather than position IGA as a passive donor, the campaign gives shoppers an active role in the fundraising chain: a purchase drives access, and access drives engagement with content built by the very children the funds support. This participatory architecture strengthens the credibility of IGA's commitment to Fondation Charles-Bruneau and to pediatric cancer research in Canada more broadly.
The choice to involve children from Fondation Charles-Bruneau as genuine creative collaborators rather than passive beneficiaries is strategically deliberate. It shifts the campaign's emotional register from charity-as-obligation to community-as-participation. Yanick Bédard, Managing Digital Director at Sid Lee, articulated this ambition directly in an interview published by Strategy on June 8, 2022, stating that the digital component gives the team the opportunity to do more, better, and to support visionary clients like IGA on projects of this kind. The statement signals that the gaming mechanic was not an executional afterthought but a strategic expansion of what cause-led retail campaigns can achieve in the Canadian market.
Alex Bernier served as Executive Creative Director on the Tough Cookies campaign at Sid Lee, overseeing a creative team that included David Lambert, Étienne Théberge, Pascal Lefebvre, and Krissi Campbell, as documented by Sid Lee. Account management was handled by Priscilla Marullo and Nadia Gilles, with strategy led by Marc-André Dubois and additional strategic planning contributed by Jean-François Lavigne, per Sid Lee's own credits.
The creative execution operates on two interconnected registers: physical and digital. The physical layer consists of four collectible temporary tattoos, each designed by a child who had received care at a Charles-Bruneau facility. The act of collection becomes an act of participation — shoppers are not simply buying a product but acquiring a child's artistic vision. The digital layer, the online video game, was built to reflect the imaginative contributions of those same children, whose input shaped both the game's visual world and its mission structure.
The world-building at the centre of the game is conceptually cohesive. The five tastes — Sweet, Salty, Bitter, Sour, and Umami — are rendered as characters inhabiting a fantastical realm, with Umami cast as a sympathetic yet destabilising villain whose grievance stems from being undervalued. The narrative arc, in which a player restores balance among tastes, maps onto the lived experience of pediatric cancer patients with quiet precision. Taste disruption during cancer treatment is a clinical reality the creative team chose to encode in the game's logic rather than state didactically, allowing the metaphor to operate emotionally without requiring the player to engage with its medical underpinning. The result is a piece of branded entertainment that earns its cause credentials through craft rather than declaration.
The Tough Cookies campaign and its associated game component earned recognition across multiple award bodies, providing a clear measure of creative and strategic impact. Tough Cookies: The Game received a Merit Award in Gaming — Gaming for Good from The One Show, as reported by The One Show. The campaign itself received two additional One Show shortlists: one in Gaming — Gaming for Good and one in Health and Wellness — Online and Mobile, also per The One Show.
At the IDEA Awards, the campaign earned a Gold Award in Produits et expériences numériques for the game, a Silver Award in Création, and a Bronze Award in Création, as documented by the IDEA Awards. The 2022 game edition also received the IDEA Awards Coup de Coeur jury prize — a distinction reserved for work that moves jurors beyond the standard scoring framework.
No independently verified sales or fundraising figures for the 2022 Tough Cookies campaign are publicly available at the time of writing. However, the structural mechanics of the campaign — a retail transaction triggering a digital experience co-created by beneficiaries — are well established in the literature on effective cause-marketing. The tattoo availability window running through June 22, 2022, created temporal urgency within IGA's Quebec and New Brunswick store network, concentrating participation into a defined giving moment rather than a diffuse awareness effort. The award profile across The One Show and IDEA Awards suggests the campaign achieved meaningful creative resonance within the Canadian advertising and gaming-for-good communities, validating Sid Lee's decision to evolve the Tough Cookies mechanic from augmented reality into a fully independent game world.
IGA's Tough Cookies is a recurring Canadian fundraising campaign supporting Fondation Charles-Bruneau's pediatric cancer research. First launched as a cause-led retail initiative, the 2022 third edition invited shoppers to purchase temporary tattoos designed by children receiving cancer care, with each purchase unlocking access to a co-created online video game developed by Sid Lee.
Sid Lee created the 2022 Tough Cookies campaign for IGA. Executive Creative Director Alex Bernier led a team that included creatives David Lambert, Étienne Théberge, Pascal Lefebvre, and Krissi Campbell, with strategy directed by Marc-André Dubois. Account management was handled by Priscilla Marullo and Nadia Gilles, as documented by Sid Lee.
The online video game was unlocked by purchasing IGA's Tough Cookies temporary tattoos. Set in a fantasy world of five personified tastes, the game challenged players to protect Sweet, Salty, Bitter, and Sour from Umami's revenge. Its narrative reflected taste loss experienced by pediatric cancer patients, and its missions were designed with input from children at Charles-Bruneau facilities.
Tough Cookies: The Game received a Merit Award in Gaming — Gaming for Good from The One Show, as reported by The One Show. At the IDEA Awards, the game earned a Gold Award in Produits et expériences numériques and the Coup de Coeur jury prize, with the broader campaign receiving Silver and Bronze Awards in Création, per the IDEA Awards.
The 2022 Tough Cookies campaign ran across Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada, through IGA store locations. Temporary tattoos — the physical mechanic that unlocked the online video game — were available for purchase in stores until June 22, 2022, as reported by Sid Lee and confirmed in strategy coverage published by Strategy on June 8, 2022.
Fondation Charles-Bruneau is the pediatric cancer research foundation that IGA's Tough Cookies campaign supports directly. Children who received care at Charles-Bruneau facilities contributed the tattoo designs and shaped the game's missions, making them active creative collaborators rather than passive beneficiaries — a distinction central to the campaign's strategic and emotional design, according to Sid Lee.
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