Nas Grunt Sends Czech Shoppers Where Bees Never Land
Náš Grunt's 'Shop where bees don't go' is a 2015 digital campaign created by McCann Prague for a Czech natural food retailer, using the counterintuitive logic that bees — drawn instinctively to sugar — avoid genuinely natural grocery stores because those stores contain no hidden sugars to seek out.
The campaign launched in Czechia in August 2015, positioned as a single-asset digital execution. Its creative premise rests on a deceptively simple biological observation: bees are reliable detectors of added sugar. Where bees congregate, sugar is present. Where bees do not go, the food is, by implication, clean. Náš Grunt inverted the conventional health-food boast — instead of claiming purity, it invited the consumer to test it through the behaviour of insects. This approach separated the brand from the broad field of self-declared natural food products circulating in the Czech market at the time.
In the Czech Republic, consumer interest in authentic, farm-sourced, and minimally processed food was growing visibly in the mid-2010s, providing Náš Grunt with a culturally receptive audience for a message built on skepticism toward mass-produced grocery alternatives. The campaign's objective was to drive both brand consideration and measurable commercial outcomes — an ambition the work ultimately delivered, as independently documented results would later confirm. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 60 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual coherence and award recognition against a modest single-asset media footprint.
Náš Grunt competed in Czech specialty and natural grocery retail, a category defined by growing consumer distrust of ingredient labelling on mainstream supermarket products. McCann Prague identified a tension at the heart of that distrust: the word 'natural' had been diluted to near-meaninglessness by widespread use across conventional food brands. Any direct claim of purity would land in an already crowded and skeptical space. The strategic answer was to remove the brand's voice from the equation entirely and replace it with an independent, non-human validator — the honeybee.
This repositioning placed Náš Grunt in direct philosophical opposition to mass-market food retail, where added sugars and processed ingredients are standard components of shelf-stable products. Competitors operating in Czech supermarket chains and discount grocery formats had no equivalent counter-argument available: their product mix would, in fact, attract bees. The campaign thereby created a test that Náš Grunt could pass and its mainstream rivals could not.
The strategic framework also anticipated the direction McCann Prague would pursue into 2016, when a follow-on campaign titled 'The Hidden Sugar' extended the same bee-based logic into a new creative execution, confirming that the bee device was conceived as a platform rather than a one-off idea, as documented in campaign archive records cited by adsspot.me. The 2015 execution established the conceptual foundation that made the 2016 work legible, demonstrating that the agency had built a durable brand idea rather than a tactical stunt.
Lars Killi served as creative director on the campaign, working alongside art directors Gerrit John Gerischer and Richard Axell. Copywriting was handled by Klára Palmer, while Rudolf Havlík served as director of photography. Planner and project manager responsibilities fell to Lucie Rust, with Martina Voprsalova leading as account director. The team operated within McCann Erickson Prague, the local arm of McCann's global network, and delivered a single-asset digital execution that earned outsized recognition relative to its media scale.
The creative execution distilled an entire strategic argument into one image and one headline. The art direction by Gerrit John Gerischer and Richard Axell had to make the absence of something — bees not appearing — legible and compelling as a visual. This is a formally difficult problem: advertising conventionally shows product benefits in positive, present terms. Here the benefit is defined by what is missing. The photography by Rudolf Havlík anchored that abstraction in physical reality, giving the concept enough tangibility to function as a direct-response device rather than a purely ambient brand statement.
Klára Palmer's copy compressed the strategic idea into a directive that doubled as a consumer invitation and a competitive claim: shop where bees don't go. The line carried the campaign's entire argument without explanation or qualification, which is the condition required for a direct piece to travel across contexts and formats. The result was a campaign that operated simultaneously as retail communication, PR asset, and award-circuit entry — a structural achievement that the subsequent Cannes Lions and Golden Drum recognition reflected.
The campaign earned a Gold Lion in PR and a Bronze Lion in Direct at Cannes Lions 2016, according to Clapboard's archive records. At Golden Drum 2016, it received the Golden Drum in Direct. At Eurobest 2016, the work took a Silver in the Direct category under Travel, Leisure, Retail, Restaurants and Fast Food, and a Bronze in Dimensional Mailing. No verified entries or wins from the Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards are documented for this campaign.
On the commercial side, the campaign is associated with a reported twenty-five percent year-on-year sales increase for Náš Grunt, alongside thirty percent growth in website traffic, as documented by selfstorming.com. These figures indicate that the creative concept translated into measurable retail behaviour in the Czech market, not merely media attention — a distinction that explains its placement in the Direct category at multiple award shows rather than solely in craft or film competitions.
No verified performance data from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious is publicly available for this campaign. The Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine creative and commercial achievement while accounting for its limited media footprint as a single digital asset and the absence of broader documented distribution or sustained paid amplification.
'Shop where bees don't go' is a 2015 digital campaign by McCann Prague for Czech natural food retailer Náš Grunt. It uses the biological logic that bees seek out sugar to argue that a store bees avoid must contain no hidden sugars, positioning Náš Grunt as a genuinely natural alternative to mainstream Czech grocery retail.
The campaign won a Gold Lion in PR and a Bronze Lion in Direct at Cannes Lions 2016, according to Clapboard's archive. It also received a Golden Drum in Direct at Golden Drum 2016, and a Silver and Bronze at Eurobest 2016, making it one of the most decorated Czech food campaigns of that award cycle.
Lars Killi served as creative director. Art direction was led by Gerrit John Gerischer and Richard Axell, with copywriting by Klára Palmer and photography by Rudolf Havlík. Lucie Rust managed planning, and Martina Voprsalova directed the account. The full team is documented in Clapboard's campaign credits archive.
The campaign is associated with a reported twenty-five percent year-on-year sales increase and thirty percent website traffic growth for Náš Grunt, as documented by selfstorming.com. These commercial outcomes in Czechia supported the campaign's placement in Direct categories at Cannes Lions, Golden Drum, and Eurobest rather than purely in brand or craft competitions.
McCann Prague identified that the word 'natural' had been overused by mainstream food brands in Czechia, making direct purity claims unconvincing. The agency replaced brand voice with an independent biological validator — the honeybee — creating a competitive test that Náš Grunt could pass and mass-market grocery rivals structurally could not, as documented in Clapboard's campaign lineage records.
A follow-on campaign titled 'The Hidden Sugar' was created by McCann Prague for Náš Grunt in June 2016, extending the same bee-based creative platform into a new execution, as documented by adsspot.me. This confirmed the bee device was conceived as a durable brand idea rather than a one-time execution, establishing a recognisable creative territory for the Czech retailer.
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