May 29, 2026
In 2024, California Pizza Kitchen dispatched a driver to deliver an order of mac and cheese to a customer’s home. The only issue: CPK forgot to include the pasta.
There was macaroni; only cheese. The container literally just contained a big vat of cheese sauce.
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Making matters worse, the customer had a fairly large following on TikTok. She filmed the empty container, posted the clip online and, as you might expect, the video went viral.
What happened next is a fascinating study in brand marketing, and how to respond to an egg-on-your-face (well, cheese-on-your-face) moment.
Jill Smith, CEO of Iris Americas, the integrated brand and demand agency that engineered CPK’s response, recently went on the Startups Decoded podcast in April to talk about the incident, and the company’s response — executed at the direction of her ad agency.
“It quickly became, like, far more viral than we would ever have expected for a little melted cheese,” Smith told host Andy Walsh.
The strategic fix, Smith said, was based on “speed and showing up like a person.”
Mac to the rescue
Within 24 hours, Smith directed her ad agency to deliver a care package to the customer who filmed the viral cheese footage: a certificate for a year of free mac and cheese, a year of free pizza and a box of dry noodles, to be a little tongue in cheek. The customer filmed herself unboxing the goodies, which also got millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Next, CPK’s then-vice president of culinary innovation, Paul Pszybylski, recorded a deadpan TikTok PSA on the “correct” way to assemble the dish — another video that racked up millions of views. CPK notably used that video to roll out a nationwide 50%-off coupon for mac and cheese.
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The metrics moved fast. According to a Shorty Awards case study filed by Iris, mac-and-cheese sales across CPK locations rose 25% during the promotion, the brand’s TikTok following roughly doubled in four days, and Google search interest for “CPK mac and cheese” spiked 200%. Chef Paul’s apology video alone collected more than 9 million views, with coverage rippling out to NBC’s Today and dozens of network affiliates.
CPK’s successful playbook
There’s a colorful history of brands turning their failures into social media success stories. In 2009, Domino’s used a “Pizza Turnaround” documentary to admit its own crust tasted like cardboard, then re-engineered the recipe; as a result, same-store sales rose 14.3% the following quarter. In 2018, KFC ran out of chicken at hundreds of UK locations and answered with a full-page newspaper ad rearranging its logo to spell “FCK” on an empty bucket.
Both moves leaned on the instinct Smith summarized for Walsh: “Be more human.” According to Edelman’s 2025 Brand Trust report, 80% of consumers say they trust the brands they use to do what’s right more than they trust business, media or the government — while noting that staying silent is no longer a defensible strategy.
For CPK, the cheese moment proved more than a one-off. The chain — which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2020 with $220 million less in debt after a wave of pandemic-era casual-dining collapses — named Iris its creative and social agency of record three months later, ahead of its 40th anniversary. By July 2025, the company had turned the mishap into a two-week “MAC-versary” promotion and rolled out a pizza-inspired Baked Mac ‘N’ Cheese lineup that now sits on its national menu.
Quick quiz
By how much did CPK mac and cheese sales rise during the promotion?
“What started as a customer service mishap turned into a massively viral moment for our brand and a renaissance for our Mac ‘N’ Cheese,” CPK Chief Marketing Officer Dawn Keller said in the anniversary announcement.
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
