How Puratos Turned Pastry Supplies Into a Symbol of Peruvian Resilience
Puratos launched "Together We Can Peru" in April 2020 as a single-film campaign created by Agencia Vena in Lima, honouring the essential workers who kept Peru functioning during the earliest and most disorienting weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, anchored by the line "The recipe is in our hands."
Puratos is a Belgian-founded global manufacturer of ingredients, mixes, and improvers for the bakery, patisserie, and chocolate sectors. In Peru, the brand operates through a dedicated local entity and serves professional bakers and pastry producers across the country. When the pandemic arrived in early 2020 and filled the market with fears and operational disruptions, Puratos chose not to advertise product performance. Instead, the brand elected to pay tribute to the workers who continued showing up — in bakeries, in logistics, in food production — to keep supply chains and communities intact. The campaign's title in Spanish, "Juntos Podemos," translates directly as "Together We Can," and the Peruvian framing of that phrase placed national identity at the centre of the message.
The campaign was published in Peru in April 2020 and submitted to the Clapboard archive by Creative Art Director Angelo Arbulu of Agencia Vena. The production team included Manuel Bellido as Director General Creativo, Ernesto Peña as writer and content lead, and Daniela Neira responsible for video. The campaign consists of one media asset — a single film — placing the entire communicative weight on narrative rather than product demonstration. Clapboard assigns "Together We Can Peru" a score of 55 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its emotional intent competently but remains constrained by limited distribution data and the absence of verified performance outcomes.
Puratos identified a precise cultural moment in Peru. During crises, communities seek solidarity before they seek solutions, and in April 2020 the Peruvian food industry was navigating simultaneous shocks: restricted movement, disrupted foodservice channels, and deep uncertainty about consumer behaviour. Rather than compete on ingredient quality or price, Puratos chose to occupy the space of shared purpose.
The strategic logic is consistent with broader shifts observed in food and drink advertising during 2020. COVID-19 disrupted commercial bakeries, foodservice operators, and ingredient suppliers across global markets, according to reporting aggregated by einpresswire.com. In Peru specifically, the food production sector was designated essential, meaning bakeries and their suppliers continued operating under strict health protocols while much of the broader economy paused. Puratos, as a supplier to that sector, had a credible reason to speak about worker resilience — its own customers were among those essential workers being honoured.
The campaign's strategic position also reflects a longer creative lineage at Agencia Vena. The agency had produced "Juntos en Tus Mejores Momentos" for Puratos in September 2019, a print campaign that used the visual metaphor of what exists inside product packaging as a representation of beautiful life moments. Both campaigns organise themselves around the concept of togetherness, suggesting a deliberate brand platform rather than a one-off pandemic response. Competitors in the Peruvian bakery ingredients space, including Lesaffre and Dawn Foods, have historically communicated on technical product grounds. Puratos consistently anchored to emotional and relational values, a differentiated position in a category that rarely speaks in the language of national solidarity.
Agencia Vena built the entire campaign on one film. That decision is the defining creative choice: no print extensions, no digital variants, no out-of-home support — just a single moving-image asset carrying the full weight of the message. In a market where multi-format campaigns are the norm for brand-building exercises, the restraint signals either a deliberate minimalism or a production environment constrained by the logistical realities of filming in Peru during a national health emergency in April 2020.
Manuel Bellido, serving as Director General Creativo, and Angelo Arbulu, as Director de Arte, shaped a narrative that positions Puratos not as a manufacturer but as a witness to effort. The campaign message — "The recipe is in our hands" — operates on two registers simultaneously: the literal vocabulary of baking and the metaphorical language of collective agency. Ernesto Peña, credited as writer and content lead, constructed copy that avoided product claims entirely and instead addressed Peruvians as a unified community. Daniela Neira handled video production, and the decision to keep the asset count to one suggests that the film was intended to function as a statement piece rather than a campaign system.
The narrative approach draws on a tradition of purpose-led food and drink advertising that prioritises the human context of production over the finished product. By framing bakers and essential food workers as the protagonists — people whose daily labour is itself "the recipe" — the campaign creates an implicit endorsement loop: Puratos supplies these workers, and these workers sustain Peru. The emotional architecture is clear, even if the production scale is modest. The film accumulated 632 views on its archived platform as of October 6, 2021, according to Clapboard's own records.
No verified performance data for "Together We Can Peru" is publicly available. No sales lift, revenue growth, market-share change, brand-awareness shift, or media engagement figures have been published or submitted to the Clapboard archive. The campaign has not recorded verified wins at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards as of the time of this writing.
What can be assessed is structural effectiveness. The campaign was built around a single film with a clear, internally consistent message. Its central line — "The recipe is in our hands" — is memorable, category-relevant, and emotionally appropriate to the April 2020 moment in Peru. The creative team made a coherent choice to foreground narrative over product, and that choice aligns with the brand's 2019 campaign positioning under Agencia Vena. For a business-to-business-adjacent brand like Puratos, whose end customers are professional bakers rather than retail consumers, a purpose-led film that circulates within the Peruvian food industry carries relational value that standard reach metrics may not fully capture.
The global bakery ingredients market was estimated at approximately 12.96 billion US dollars in 2020, according to einpresswire.com, indicating the scale of the sector Puratos operates within internationally. In Peru, where the food production sector remained active throughout the initial lockdown period, the symbolic timing of the campaign in April 2020 gave it contextual relevance. Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 55 out of 100, reflecting solid emotional intent and creative coherence, offset by limited distribution ambition and the absence of any independently verifiable outcome data.
Puratos launched "Together We Can Peru" in April 2020 as a tribute to essential workers sustaining Peru during the COVID-19 pandemic. Created by Agencia Vena in Lima, the single-film campaign used the line "The recipe is in our hands" to frame collective resilience as a shared national responsibility rooted in the language of baking.
Agencia Vena, based in Lima, Peru, created the campaign. Manuel Bellido served as Director General Creativo, Angelo Arbulu as Director de Arte, Ernesto Peña as writer and content lead, and Daniela Neira handled video production. Angelo Arbulu submitted the campaign to the Clapboard archive on behalf of the agency.
The campaign was published in Peru in April 2020. Its Spanish title, "Juntos Podemos," translates as "Together We Can." The campaign was released during the earliest weeks of Peru's COVID-19 lockdown, positioning Puratos as a brand aligned with national solidarity at a moment of acute uncertainty in the food industry.
The line operates on two simultaneous levels. Literally, it references the craft of baking — the domain Puratos supplies. Figuratively, it frames national recovery as something Peruvians collectively author. Writer Ernesto Peña constructed the campaign copy to avoid product claims entirely, addressing the Peruvian public as a unified community capable of overcoming shared hardship.
No verified award wins for the campaign have been recorded. A review of Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, and WARC Awards found no documented recognition. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 55 out of 100, reflecting coherent emotional execution offset by limited verifiable outcome data.
Agencia Vena had created "Juntos en Tus Mejores Momentos" for Puratos in September 2019, a print campaign also built around togetherness as a central idea. Both campaigns avoid product-performance claims and instead anchor the Puratos brand to relational and emotional values, suggesting a deliberate long-term platform rather than an opportunistic pandemic response.
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