I Pitched A Free Food Website On National TV During My Final Semester Of University.

In a small university city, information moves differently than it does in a bigger metro city. Everyone is within one or two degrees of separation from everyone else, including senior administration of the University. That proximity changes everything about how you market something.

In February of 2025, SnackRadar started as a simple idea: aggregate free food events happening across campus into one place, so students who needed it would never miss a meal. The execution was straightforward. The strategy behind it was something I thought about carefully.

In a concentrated community, being first and being visible are the same thing. If I could position SnackRadar as the destination for campus food events it would be the primary source of attention in that niche, which could solve very specific problems. I was also six weeks away from graduating. So while I was a student I had to build a student-centered solution quickly and let everyone know about it quickly.

So I moved fast, built a beautiful looking website with strawberries on the home page and I thought it was funny because I don't even like strawberries. It was catchy and every time the website loaded the image of the strawberries came first and then all the other clickable elements. So while people waited for a split second they were awestruck by the image and that created the shareability. Eventually more people heard about it and the university also promoted it through their platforms and then in order to create a brand that's more established around it, I started reaching out. I contacted one local news outlet. They ran the story. Other outlets started reaching out to me. One credible placement signals to every other outlet that the story is worth covering. The next thing I knew, I was pitching my solution on National TV on one side of my university campus, and rushing to the other side, 10 minutes before my Marketing class.

Beyond the size of the reach, it's not the entirety of Canada that is my target audience; it's just students in Lethbridge, specifically students that are on campus and looking for free food on campus. The national TV coverage does well on social media too and the coverage did something more important strategically. News reaches audiences that word-of-mouth cannot. It carries institutional trust. When prospective users saw SnackRadar on television, people who had not heard of it yet felt a curiosity words it.

The result was a platform that grew to thousands of users, addressed real food insecurity on campus, and got there through a creative marketing strategy.