If Carlsberg Did Easter

The Design Process

This was a very exciting project on a grand scale. After being asked to work on this project I met with Carlsberg along with the PR and event agencies involved in the project where I showed them mood boards and visuals of how the chocolate bar could look. My designs included creating chocolate skirting boards, frames, panelling, wallpaper, pictures, a dartboard, a television, bottle tops, bottles, bar stools, beer mats, bar runners and even bowls of snacks. I love adding lots of details to my work.

Project Details

The giant edible experiential bar had a fully functioning beer pump, passers-by could enjoy a Carlsberg in a chocolate ‘glass’ or nibble away at the solid chocolate bar top. 

We used about 500kg of finest Belgian chocolate in total. The bar was built on a 48 sheet poster site, measuring six metres wide by three metres high, and displayed outdoors in central London.

There were chocolate beer mats and bar runners complete with Carlsberg logo written in white chocolate, solid milk chocolate beer bottles, chocolate bottle tops, 140 chocolate hop leaves for the chocolate wall paper, and even chocolate bar stools.

Dharmesh Rana, Senior Brand Manager at Carlsberg UK, said when the activation launched: “We pride ourselves on turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and by creating a world-first chocolate bar, we feel that we’ve done just that.”

Members of the public were able to step inside the bar and help themselves to a pint of Carlsberg served in a chocolate glass.

Even Jon from the Food is Art team featured in the television ad, you can spot him if you look quickly!

• Hop shapes were created from milk chocolate to create the wallpaper. These were positioned in repeat. We created a mould in-house of the hop design to make these.
• A dartboard was created from milk chocolate with dark and white chocolate details, with some edible gold highlights.
• A television was created from milk chocolate with a mosaic image of footballers made from hundreds of chocolate bottle tops. We created a mould in-house of bottle tops for this and used dark, milk and white chocolate to create a 3 tone chocolate image.
• 120kg of milk chocolate was used to make the 5cm thick bar top, this was created in huge slabs of chocolate, overall measurement of the bar top was 500cm long, and was a heavy item to move!
• We created moulds for the bar runners so we could create the main part from milk chocolate and add a white chocolate Carlsberg logo that sat flat, like a real bar runner.
• Beer mats were created in milk chocolate with white chocolate Carlsberg logos.
• I moulded real Carlsberg beer bottles to make exact replicas in milk chocolate with the raised Carlsberg logo like on the real bottles. Some were presented in a chocolate ice bucket wit chocolate ice cubes.
• Large chocolate pictures were created with solid chocolate frames, some dusted with edible gold. I designed these pictures to reflect the history of Carlsberg and they featured J.C Jacobsen the founder of Carlsberg, the Carlsberg factory in Copenhagen, and other Carlsberg icons.
• Overall we used 500kg of chocolate to create the chocolate bar. 

The activity was the latest in the long-running ‘If Carlsberg did…’ series, and it was an honour to be asked by everybody involved to make the chocolate part. A big part to say the least! I had my studio packed full of chocolate and people, just making the dado rails and skirting boards took weeks! It was so much good fun, and a real chance to push chocolate to the limit.

The media coverage for the campaign was incredible, and was featured in a range of consumer and trade publications, including Ad Week, Campaign, Event Magazine, The Mirror, Marketing Week, The Drum and many more… Plus it was ‘liked’ and congratulated by numerous agencies across creative, media, specialist, PR and experiential sectors.

The British public love beer and chocolate, so we’re delighted to be part of the team to bring them together to create probably the best bar there could be!