Panda Express launched 'Have You Eaten Yet?' in April 2025, an integrated US campaign using Karaoke Aunties to reframe food as a language of immigrant family
Panda Express Turns a Simple Question Into a Cultural Love Story
Panda Express launched 'Have You Eaten Yet?' in April 2025 in the United States, an integrated film and digital campaign created with independent creative agency Opinionated and directed by Kate Hollowell of Epoch Films, using the figure of the Karaoke Auntie to reframe food as the primary language through which immigrant families express love, pride, and belonging.
The campaign centers on a deeply recognisable social ritual. In many Asian and Asian American households, asking whether someone has eaten is not a question about appetite — it is an act of care, a proxy for emotions that cultural norms or generational distance make difficult to articulate directly. Panda Express uses that insight to position its cuisine not merely as convenient Asian-inspired food but as a vessel for those unspoken emotional exchanges. The Karaoke Aunties at the heart of the narrative are affectionate, slightly chaotic, and incapable of saying outright that they are proud of you — but entirely capable of feeding you until you understand it anyway.
Launched on April 24, 2025, across digital and integrated media channels in the United States, the campaign includes an extended film version that, according to publicly available platform data cited by the campaign's documentation, had accumulated more than one million views. The work represents a sharpening of the emotional creative direction Panda Express began with its 2023 platform 'However You Panda', now applied with greater cultural specificity to Asian American and immigrant family dynamics, as reported by mediapost.com. This Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects a campaign that succeeds in cultural authenticity and emotional legibility while operating within a well-established narrative register for the brand.
Panda Express built 'Have You Eaten Yet?' on a consumer insight that runs deeper than occasion-based messaging. The brand identified that food functions as an emotional intermediary in many immigrant and Asian American families — a finding that connects directly to the demographics it serves and seeks to grow within the United States. By anchoring the campaign to this cultural truth rather than to product attributes or promotional value, the brand positions itself as a participant in meaningful family life rather than a commodity quick-service option.
The competitive context in the US fast-casual sector makes this distinction strategically necessary. Rivals including Chipotle and Wingstop have both invested heavily in culturally resonant digital content and loyalty-driven storytelling to capture younger diners, as reported by marketingtechnews.net. The Asian and Latin American fast-casual cuisine segment is expanding faster than the broader fast-casual category, according to straitsresearch.com, which identifies that segment's compound annual growth rate as outpacing the overall market. Within North America, fast-casual dining represents a substantial and growing share of restaurant sales, according to dataintelo.com, which tracks North America as accounting for the dominant portion of global fast-casual revenues.
Opinionated won the Panda Express creative account following a competitive review in 2024, as reported by magazine.shots.net, and the agency's approach has leaned consistently into emotional and cultural territory rather than promotional mechanics. The 'Have You Eaten Yet?' platform extends a creative lineage that began with 'However You Panda' in 2023 and continued through 'The Invitation', the Lunar New Year film of January 2025, which established the Auntie character type as a recurring cultural anchor for the brand's storytelling in the United States, according to cbinsights.com and travisyeehaw.com.
Kate Hollowell directed 'Have You Eaten Yet?' through Epoch Films. The choice of director is legible in the work: Hollowell brings a background in emotionally nuanced performance-led narrative, and the extended film's effectiveness depends almost entirely on the credibility of its ensemble — the Karaoke Aunties whose deflected expressions of love give the campaign its emotional texture and comic warmth.
The production assembled a specific and collaborative creative team. Executive Creative Directors Mark Fitzloff and Rob Palmer led the creative direction at Opinionated, with Associate Creative Director Cameron Soane and Senior Copywriter Chris Le shaping the narrative voice, as documented by magazine.shots.net and pixloop.ai. Soane has stated that the work was built around the conviction that feeding people is an act of love and that the campaign aims to capture what he described as the joy, chaos, and heart of family, as reported by screenmag.com. Director of Photography Larkin Seiple handled visual execution, with editing by Peter Wiedensmith at Editorial Board and colour by Neil Anderson. Sound design came from Dave Wolf, with original composition by Nathaniel Jenkins of Butter Music and Sound, according to Magazine Shots — a score that carries the tonal balance between comedy and genuine feeling that the campaign's premise requires.
The karaoke setting itself is a precise creative choice. It places the Aunties in an environment defined by performed emotion and communal participation, making the displacement of their real feelings onto food and song both absurd and entirely believable. The integrated media structure — spanning film and digital channels across the United States — allows the extended narrative to anchor shorter-form content, giving the campaign coherence across formats without reducing the central idea to a tagline.
Panda Express reported measurable outcomes that connect the 'Have You Eaten Yet?' creative platform to broader brand momentum. The campaign's direct predecessor, the Lunar New Year film 'The Invitation', generated 140 million paid video impressions, exceeding its stated goal by 62.7%, according to Winning Work. The same campaign produced 860,000 clicks, surpassing its click goal by 137%, and earned 258 million earned-media impressions with sentiment recorded as entirely positive or neutral, according to winning.work. These figures establish a performance baseline for the cultural storytelling approach that 'Have You Eaten Yet?' extends.
Panda Express reported that Q1 2025 performance increased its market share by 0.2 percentage points, according to winning.work — a result that coincides with the period in which both 'The Invitation' and the April launch of 'Have You Eaten Yet?' were in market in the United States. A campaign documentation page also reported more than 31 million digital and social interactions associated with the broader creative platform, according to bernicechao.com. The extended film version of 'Have You Eaten Yet?' had accumulated over one million views on platform, per data cited in the campaign's own materials.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness lies in its compression of brand positioning and cultural resonance into a single, repeatable idea. The question 'Have you eaten yet?' requires no explanation for its target audience and no cultural translation — it lands immediately, and that immediacy is a durable creative asset. The Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its emotional premise with real craft and cultural intelligence, even as it operates within narrative conventions the brand has begun to establish as its own.
'Have You Eaten Yet?' is an integrated film and digital campaign launched by Panda Express in the United States in April 2025. Created by agency Opinionated and directed by Kate Hollowell of Epoch Films, it uses the figure of the Karaoke Auntie to reframe food as the unspoken language of love and pride in immigrant and Asian American families.
Kate Hollowell directed the campaign through Epoch Films. Hollowell worked alongside Executive Creative Directors Mark Fitzloff and Rob Palmer at Opinionated, with Director of Photography Larkin Seiple handling visuals and composer Nathaniel Jenkins of Butter Music and Sound creating the original score, as documented by magazine.shots.net.
The Karaoke Aunties are the central characters of 'Have You Eaten Yet?', representing a specific archetype of immigrant family affection — warm and proud but emotionally indirect. Food and song become their means of expressing feelings they struggle to say aloud, grounding the campaign's cultural insight in a recognisable and humorous family dynamic.
The preceding Lunar New Year film 'The Invitation' generated 140 million paid video impressions, exceeding its goal by 62.7%, and 860,000 clicks, surpassing its click target by 137%, according to winning.work. It also produced 258 million earned-media impressions with entirely positive or neutral sentiment, establishing the creative platform's commercial effectiveness.
Opinionated, an independent creative agency, created 'Have You Eaten Yet?' for Panda Express. The agency won the Panda Express account following a competitive review in 2024, as reported by magazine.shots.net. Opinionated's President Trish Adams led the agency relationship, with the creative team helmed by Executive Creative Directors Mark Fitzloff and Rob Palmer.
Panda Express's 'Have You Eaten Yet?' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine craft in cultural storytelling and emotional execution while acknowledging that it operates within a narrative framework the brand has established across its recent integrated work in the United States.
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