GOATED ROOTED

In 1960, Junior Kuppanna opened as a 12-seat eatery in Erode, a town in Tamil Nadu, the southern Indian state that is home to the Tamil people and their language, one of the oldest living languages in the world. Sixty-five years later, it serves Kongu cuisine, the food of western Tamil Nadu, across India and seven countries. It is still cooked the way it was first taught: recipes passed down through generations, masalas ground by hand, served on a banana leaf.

The brand needed a complete rebrand and relaunch that would speak to a young Tamil generation without changing a single recipe.

We found the answer in another Tamil tradition. Kattai Koothu is a centuries-old Tamil folk theatre, performed through the night in village squares and passed from one generation of artists to the next, just like a recipe. Its performers paint their own faces and wear carved wooden ornaments, and the art survives only because each generation chooses to carry it forward.

So we positioned Junior Kuppanna’s chefs as artists, and their kitchen as a stage.

GOATED ROOTED captures both sides of the brand. “Goated” comes from youth slang for the GOAT, the greatest of all time. “Rooted” is for a brand that has never left home.

The film brings a Kattai Koothu artist and a Junior Kuppanna chef onto one stage as equals: one turns art into flavour, the other has turned flavour into art.