Hellmann's Lets Creators And Voters Decide Its 50 State Search For America's Sandwich

Hellmann's is marking America's 250th anniversary by letting the public pick the country's official sandwich. One sandwich from each of the 50 states enters a bracket, and voting narrows the field round by round toward a single winner. The brand does not pick the finalists. Recipes come from creators in each state cooking their own version, and votes are cast in Instagram comments and on a campaign microsite.

Brent Lukowski is Senior Marketing Director for Condiments US at Unilever, where he leads Hellmann's marketing in the American market. His work at Unilever spans brands including Dove, and at Hellmann's he has overseen a run of programs built for social conversation, including a petition to redesign the sandwich emoji and a garlic aioli pitched as vampire protection.

Every state entry arrives with its own idea of what a sandwich is. "It's not up to us to decide. It really is up to each individual what constitutes a sandwich," Lukowski says.

Fifty states seeded

Hellmann's assembles the field itself, choosing one sandwich to represent each state and sorting them into four geographic groups. A qualifying round cut the 50 down to 16, four in each region, and every round after that pits sandwiches against each other inside their own group. The Philly cheesesteak and the New Jersey Italian sub sit in the same Northeast bracket, so they knock each other out before either faces the Midwest or the South. Four regional champions emerge from that structure and meet in a national final.

Each entry carries a nickname written for a screenshot, with Nevada's patty melt seeded as "Jackpot on a plate" and Kansas entering burnt ends as "The ends is just the beginning." Every sandwich on the site links through to a Hellmann's recipe page, and mayonnaise appears in the build of each one, which puts the product inside the cooking instructions. States stay posted under their own header after they lose, keeping all 50 recipe pages reachable for the length of the contest.

"Where people are from is a deeply personal and proud component of their identity. A bracket gave us a mechanism people already know from betting on sports or office pools," Lukowski says. Grouping by region builds the stakes as the field shrinks. A state that clears two rounds has beaten its neighbors, and its voters arrive at the national stage with something to defend against a part of the country that eats differently.

Spread the votes

Taking part costs a voter almost nothing. A comment on a Hellmann's Instagram post registers as a vote, with no sign-in and no click out to a separate page. The microsite serves people who want to study the full lineup before deciding, with every sandwich photographed and captioned, and each person gets one vote per matchup. Updates on each round go out through Hellmann's existing email program, which keeps the loop inside channels the brand already operates.

"Reducing friction and making it easy for people to get involved was important for this campaign to be effective. You can vote right in the comments," Lukowski says. Unilever has said it plans to shift half of its advertising spend toward social-first work, which puts a premium on formats that can hold a brand in a feed for weeks. Voting windows open for two or three days and close again, so the brand has a reason to post every few days and the audience has a reason to check back.

Casting the kitchen

Hellmann's locked the sandwiches before it cast anyone. The brand worked through which entry would represent each state, and which version of that sandwich people there would recognize as their own. Creators came next, hired to cook those entries on camera.

"We pored over which sandwiches to feature and what counts as an accurate representation of a state. We looked for people who were authentic voices for their state, had hometown pride, and had the creative and culinary chops to feature a recipe a lot of people would resonate with," Lukowski says. The brand leaves the construction of each recipe to the creator, including where the mayonnaise lands, and the finished posts go up on the creators' own accounts before they surface on the campaign site.

Jeff Mauro, the Food Network host behind Sandwich King and a co-host of The Kitchen, anchors the program as host and commentator. He works the search without weighing in on which sandwich should win, and his involvement extends to coordinating with the chefs cooking for individual states. "Usually the pressure is all on me. They say, you're the king, you choose. And I say, no, this is America, baby. We're a democracy. You show up, you vote, and let the people choose," Mauro says.

The virtual set

Hellmann's built the campaign's launch film around AI-generated environments, with Mauro shot against green screen and the world around him produced afterward. The approach built out settings the production never had to stage, giving a single film the scale of a 50-state search. "That was my first experience with AI-generated green screen content. There's no eagle in the room, so you don't know what to expect. By the second scene you really get into it," Mauro says.

Talent buy-in matters here, because the performance comes first and the world around it arrives later. Mauro delivered a full day against a blank stage on the strength of a description, then saw the finished film once it was cut. "This is going to be a great campaign, and people are really going to get behind it," he adds.