Tiny Chef has had a roller-coaster year. Just months after being named Outstanding Preschool Animated Series at the Children's & Family Emmy Awards 2025, his show was abruptly cancelled by Nickelodeon in the summer.
The barely comprehensible 6.5-inch tall vegetarian puppet had enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame, but suddenly his career was on the line. He was distraught; a broken weird green creature.
Creators Rachel Larsen, Ozlem Akturk and Adam Reid put out an SOS seeking funding to keep the beloved series alive on social media. And now it seems Tiny Chef may have found a surprisingly perfect saviour: the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
The Tiny Chef Show premiered on Nickelodeon in 2022. It built up a loyal following – among adults as well as kids – through its host's stop motion recipes for miniature vegetarian dishes cooked up in his tree-stump home.
Now the diminutive green gourmand is going out into the world as the star of a new campaign for Ikea. Blending stop motion animation with live action, the first ad sees him in his element shopping for kitchenware in an Ikea store with production designer Jason Kolowsky, AKA Bashem.
Like many of us when we visit an Ikea store, Tiny Chef is soon distracted from the task at hand by beds, plushies and spatulas – lots of spatulas (some commenters on the video say they also scream like that when they visit an Ikea too).
There are some adorably perfect details, from Tiny Chef's tiny Ikea blue bag (so that's who those key rings are for) to the lunch of a single falafel (Ikea's introduced the veggie option to celebrate forty years of its famous meatballs).
The piece ends with our culinary hero seeing a job ad seeking a tiny plant-based chef. Challenge accepted, he says, suggesting there will be more episodes to come (and some actual cooking). Stay posted via the Tiny Chef page on the Ikea website.
Like other recent campaigns that have made use of traditional animation techniques, such as the Intermarché Christmas ad, the campaign has gone down a storm on social media. I for one look forward to hearing Tiny Chef try to pronounce the names of Ikea's furniture.
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