We Are Play
Staff zone Submit a brief

Case study · Waterloo Station, January 2026

HelloFresh at Waterloo

A real kitchen sat inside a giant box on the Waterloo concourse, with dinner served live every evening.

Get a quick quoteSubmit a brief
Client
HelloFresh, through its experiential agency
Campaign
Bring Back Dinnertime
Where
Waterloo Station, London
When
20 - 22 January 2026
Live
From 5pm, for an hour

Services delivered

  • Actors
  • Child actors
  • Child licences
  • Live immersive theatre
  • Event manager
  • Team leader
  • On-site support
  • Brand ambassadors
  • Sampling
  • Media session
  • Influencers

01The brief

HelloFresh started 2026 with Bring Back Dinnertime: a giant box on the main concourse at Waterloo Station, built as a family kitchen. Each evening at 5pm it opened and a family cooked and ate dinner inside it, live, for an hour.

02What we did

We cast the families and ran the team around the box.

We looked after everything from casting to the live dinners.

  1. January · Casting

    Two families

    We matched performers to the roles in the brief: a mum, a dad, an older and a younger sibling.

  2. Before the live dates · Licences

    Licensing the child performers

    Each child had a performance licence from their council, a risk assessment for every performance and signed parental consent.

  3. 14 January · Rehearsal

    Finding the tone

    At rehearsal with the agency and the client, the notes were plenty of laughter, faces to the front and no talking over each other.

  4. 5pm · Live

    One hour, six scenes

    The family opened the box, chopped, cooked and laid the table, rang the dinner bell at 5:30, ate, and closed with dessert and a cheers.

  5. All three days · The concourse

    The team outside the box

    An event manager worked every day, with brand ambassadors, runners and a giveaway team handing out goody bags.

  • 2families cast
  • 3live evenings
  • 1hour live each night
  • 9,000goody bags given away

03The result

We cast the actors and child actors for two of the three evenings, sorted the child licences and rehearsals, and supported the whole event on site with an event manager, a team leader and brand ambassadors sampling 9,000 boxes, plus a media session with influencers. That summer we staffed the HelloFresh Curious Kitchen at the Natural History Museum too, with an event manager and DBS-checked brand ambassadors on site every day for five weeks.

The giant HelloFresh box on the Waterloo Station concourse

9,000 boxes went out in three days.

Inside the HelloFresh box, looking out through the glass at the concourse
Inside the boxA working family kitchen
The giant HelloFresh box with giant vegetables on the Waterloo Station concourse
The buildWaterloo Station concourse
A brand ambassador in a green hat product sampling for HelloFresh at Waterloo Station
On the concourse9,000 boxes sampled

More from us.

The main stage and audience at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival cosplay walk, ExCeL LondonServiceImmersive event staffingActors, character performers and the teams around them.An event host with the queue at King’s CrossCase studyUber Eats HalloweenCostume actors hid inside a giant takeaway bag at King’s Cross to scare the queue.A survey host with cosplayers at MCM London Comic Con, ExCeL LondonCase study8 years of fan researchFans have filled in 20,000+ iPad surveys across 15 MCM London Comic Con shows.

On this job: immersive event staffing, actors for brand activations and brand ambassador agency.

Let’s talk.

If you’re planning something similar, we’d love to hear about it.

Simple staffing enquiryGet a quick quoteSend us the roles, dates, place and numbers. This is best for events in the next few days or weeks. Fuller campaign detailSubmit a briefFor launches, festivals, tours and longer programmes. We’ll call to talk it through, then send a staffing plan and full quote.