Kraft Dinner's Mother's Day Miss

David Pullara
May 9
4 min read

I couldn't help but smile when I first read about Kraft Dinner's 2025 Mother's Day promotion.

After all, I'm a marketer who loves creative ideas.

And this promotion was nothing if not creative.

As a nod to the time-honoured tradition of schoolchildren making pasta crafts to give to their mothers on Mother's Day, Kraft worked with an online jeweller RingConcierge.com to create and sell a "Kraft Mac & Cheese Forever Macaroni Necklace".

Gold macaroni-shaped necklace on a chain, labeled "Kraft Mac & Cheese Forever Macaroni Necklace". Price: $25, 14K yellow gold. Sale details visible.

Each necklace featured a "single, 24k gold noodle on a delicate 16-inch chain" and was being sold for the absurdly low price of $25, "to keep things accessible, just as it does with its macaroni and cheese."

To be clear, I have no affinity for Kraft Mac & Cheese. I grew up in an Italian household where Mac & Cheese was considered a crime against our culture, and I can't remember my mother ever making it for me or my sisters when we were kids. I'm fairly certain I didn't even taste the stuff until I was in my forties, and only then because my (non-Italian) wife had made some for our children and curiosity got the better of me. Honestly, I can take it or leave it.

But my children enjoy it, so my wife and I jokingly compete for bragging rights as to who makes it better. And since our children unanimously agree that she is the better Mac & Cheese chef, I thought a gold noodle necklace would be an amusing Mother's Day gift.

The article I read indicated a limited number of necklaces would be available every day from May 1st until May 6th, with a new supply dropping each day at noon EST.

Suspecting demand for the artificially inexpensive gold necklace would be high, I made sure to be at my computer just before noon on May 1st. At 11:58 am EST, I started hitting refresh on my browser every ten seconds so that as soon as the "Drops 12pm EST" button changed to "Buy Now", I could immediately add a necklace to my cart and proceed to purchase.

The "Buy Now" button never came.

Despite refreshing my browser at exactly 12pm, the message on what normally would have been the "Buy Now" box immediately went from "Drops 12pm EST" to "Sold Out".

The same thing happened the next day.

And the day after that.

Each time I tried to secure a noodle necklace (including on May 6th, when I captured multiple time-stamped screenshots of my attempt to purchase what Kraft had promised to make available, which can be found at the end of this post), the result was the same: the screen went from "available soon" to "sold out" instantaneously.

I don't know why the noodle necklaces were instantly sold out every day -- "Et tu, Bots?" -- or why, on the last day of the promotion, the drop was thirteen minutes later than promised.

But I do have a few thoughts on whether this promotion can be considered a success.

To move the needle on short-term sales, this promotion would have needed some mechanism to "encourage" those who wanted to buy a gold noodle necklace to first purchase a box (or two, or ten) of Kraft Mac & Cheese. It would have been relatively easy for Kraft to print codes on the inside of pasta boxes, set up a website where hopeful purchasers could redeem said codes, and then give ONLY those with a successful redemption a "place in line" when the necklaces became available. But this promotion clearly wasn't tied to sales.

To move the needle on any brand love metrics (which would eventually move the needle on sales), there would have had to have been a lot of "noodles" available for purchase. Ideally, everybody who wanted a necklace would have been able to get one, and there would be legions of Kraft Mac & Cheese moms around the world this week proudly showcasing their cheesy necklaces.

Admittedly, when you decide to make an $800 gold necklace available for only $25, there needs to be certain limits on how many units you make available; as one of my mentors used to quip, "When you're losing money on every sale, the last thing you want is volume."

But you can't wear what you don't have, and if my experience trying to secure a necklace wasn't some strange anomaly, there aren't anywhere near enough necklaces being worn right now to significantly impact brand awareness, let alone brand love.

So was this promotion a success?

It was a public relations win, and you only need to Google "Kraft noodle necklace" and see how many different publications wrote about this promotion to be convinced of that.

It was a win for creativity. If Kraft's goal was to win a prize at Cannes this year, this promotion will almost certainly prove successful: it was a very unique, very on-brand stunt that deserves all the love it's likely to get from the marketing community. The agencies involved deserve kudos for coming up with such a fun idea, and the decision-makers at Kraft should be applauded for their willingness to execute something unconventional.

But the key word in that last paragraph is "stunt".

This promotion isn't going to generate any incremental sales or any incremental brand love.

And the fact that many of those who wanted to buy a necklace may have had trouble getting one could be a net-negative for the brand, which is never a good thing.

So I'd say that, overall, Kraft Dinner's Mother's Day promotion was a miss.

But it did make me smile.

And I think it will make at least a few eBay sellers smile too...

eBay search results for "Kraft forever macaroni" show six listings of gold macaroni-shaped necklaces. Prices range from C$529 to C$905.

P.S. Suspecting something was off, and knowing I'd probably write this blog post as a result, I decided to take screenshots of my experience on May 6th. Here's what I saw when I tried to buy a golden noodle.

At 11:59am: