Post by Shiran Botbol, Head of the Consumer Brands Division at Dani Levy Communications:
‘Rozalach’ is one of Israel’s most famous and beloved desserts. The melting pastries of the Landwer chain have become a revered dessert, considered the ultimate guilty pleasure, with a great mythology behind it. So much so that when the news site ‘Haaretz’ once published the recipe for making them, it became the most read on the site. And if that wasn’t enough, we received thousands of likes and comments when we shared the recipe on our office’s Facebook page, which is inactive and has only a few hundred followers. In other words, we received more comments than followers. We saw that people started tagging each other, thus creating a chain reaction with an engagement anomaly that was rare at the time.
However, the dessert invented by the Landwer chain, which even registered a trademark, became a common generic name, and hundreds of coffee shops all over the country began serving it as their own and even listing it as an official dessert on the menu. Once, I even found myself arguing with a journalist who claimed that “Rozalach is an invention of a Haifa chain,” and only after I explained the origin of the name to her was she convinced (the origin of the name for those who did not know: the group of friends who founded Landwer, Ofer Koren, Oren Maor, and Nir Kaspi, had previously (and to this day) an ultra-popular bar called Rosa Parks, which they established after their military service in the navy. At the end of tiring shifts, they would indulge in the only dessert they managed to produce in the small kitchen, and later, when they established Landwer, they named the dessert ‘Rozalach,’ referencing Rosa Parks).
Jump forward 18 years to June 2022 – the peak of Web3 and NFT. When the collectibles market exploded, the agency’s CEO, Dani Levy, gathered the employees and said: we must find a client to make the first commercial NFT in Israel. Before we managed to email clients, Dani had already closed everything with Ofer Koren, the managing partner of the Landwer chain, and Dafna Rozentsvieg, the marketing manager without borders.
Dani knew that the Rozalach was a sensitive point for Ofer, so he convinced him to make an NFT of cute Rozalachs, a total of six, which would grant their buyers a free Rozalach portion for a year at all the chain’s branches. “This way,” Dani said, “we will show the world how beloved the Rozalachs are and establish them as an asset of Landwer in the absolute place: the blockchain.”
So, the project got the green light, and we went to our programmer friends at Fusionary, who assisted us with the designs, concept, and smart contract. Two weeks later, the project launched and made substantial, joyous media noise. The media review presented a value of over 15 million NIS for the move (in which the main cost was the desserts given to the token holders), without including immeasurable buzz, such as a review of the campaign in the curricula of senior marketing lecturers, including at prestigious academic institutions like Reichman University.
But above all, the most important thing was that the brief achieved its goal, reminding everyone of the origin of the Rozalach and preventing further pirating of the beloved and talked-about dessert in Israel.