Vanilla Gorilla Café: one reel, 11 million views.

The videos that helped us grow.

Our story began with content creation. For Vanilla Gorilla Café in Portugal, we explored videos built around people, conversation and humour. We worked with vox pop, short question-and-answer conversations, and jokes inspired by what was happening around us.

This kind of video helped us grow in the digital world. The pineapple reel is one of the pieces that best captures that part of our journey.

The pineapple, Mercadona and looking for love.

At the time, a joke about Mercadona, a supermarket chain, was circulating in Portugal. Taking an upside-down pineapple in your shopping trolley to a particular aisle at a certain time was supposed to signal that you were looking for love.

The story got people talking and turned the pineapple into a kind of code for anyone hoping to meet someone. That was the reference behind our video.

We brought the joke into Vanilla Gorilla Café. It explains both the pineapple in the scene and the caption: the café does not sell pineapples, but you can bring your own. The reel reached 11 million views on Instagram. Watch the original Portuguese-language video below.

The context was part of the joke.

Without knowing the Mercadona joke, the pineapple might look like a random object. For anyone familiar with the reference, it had another meaning: the person carrying it could be looking for love.

That is the joke we brought into the café scene. Something people were already talking about became our own version, in a different setting.

When I look at this video, that is what stands out: recognising a reference people understood and finding a simple way to play with it. The context explains both the pineapple and the reactions in the scene.

From conversations to humour.

The vox-pop videos and this reel are part of our work with Vanilla Gorilla Café, but they use different formats. In vox pop, we follow people’s answers to a question. Here, we built a sketch around the pineapple joke.

Both put people at the centre. Their conversations, expressions and reactions bring the video to life. Exploring these ways of telling stories helped us find our voice in the digital world.

A reel with 11 million views.

This joke took us to 11 million views. It became one of the examples of our work with Vanilla Gorilla Café and the videos that marked our growth.

That is the story we wanted to share here: a reference people were already talking about, our version inside the café and a video that went on to reach a wide audience.