Love Food Hate Waste is part of the global mission to reduce the amount of food going to waste and promote action. TBWA\’s mould-covered campaign was gross, but it grew on you.
Changing behaviour around food is tough, especially when it comes to waste.
Life is busy, and it’s all too easy to forget what’s lurking in the back of the fridge, and then throw it away. Out of sight, out of mind.
When TBWA\ NZ got the brief that Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) wanted to stop people wasting food, Creative Lead Frank Garguilo says it was a “big ask”.
“Like, how do you make a dent in food waste? How do you stop people wasting food?” he says.
“From the beginning, we knew the food waste issue was a big deal. So we just set out to make a really big deal out of it.”
Kiwis waste more than 157,000 tonnes of food every year – that’s $3.2 billion worth.
These stats were “gross” for Garguilo, but they provided a heavy motivator.
“Everyone’s part of the problem, us too,” he points out.
At the campaign’s core is LFHW’s ‘Eat me first’ stickers, given out at supermarkets to help householders keep track of expiring products. They’re a visible reminder to help people eat older food first instead of letting it go off then binning it.
The campaign was promoting this as a solution to food waste and a way to change behaviour.
But getting people to pick up the stickers and actually use them was a challenge. So how could TBWA\ ‘sell’ these free stickers?
The ‘yuck factor’ was key. Tapping into feelings of disgust at the scale of the problem was the ideal way to make this issue relatable and get people to act, says Mark Lloyd, Strategy Director at TBWA\.
No better way to evoke disgust than actual mould growing on giant out-of-home campaigns.
LFHW and TBWA\ spread real-life mouldy billboards across Auckland to draw attention to the problem. They featured giant petri dishes of agar, infected with bacteria that spread across them over time – a day-to-day reminder to passersby of what might be happening to food at home.
Working together with scientists at Landcare Bio and production company Bootleg, TBWA\ got into the lab to create the real mould that – fun fact – came from blue cheese.
“The spoiler alert mould got the issue on people’s radars, made them feel like this is the thing I need to address in my own house,” says Lloyd.
Drawing on New Zealand’s love of oversize food landmarks – the famous giant carrot in Ohakune springs to mind – TBWA\ saw an opportunity.
In Auckland’s CBD, TBWA\ placed a 16-foot tall replica of a mould-covered lamb chop right outside Britomart train station.
Lloyd describes it as “a cultural way in. We’ve got a big food problem. Let’s make some big food.”
“You feel the weight and the gravity of it, no matter what executions you run into, but people that face these things walked away remembering them,” adds Garguilo.
Choosing busy locations such as the Britomart train station ensured regular commuters and passersby saw the mould grow increasingly stomach churning.
As an emotion, disgust is really powerful and memorable.
Lloyd and Garguilo say disgust is an underused emotion in the advertising world, so placing it at the centre of the campaign becomes quite confronting – showing people the gravity of the situation and prompting them to walk away empowered to make a small behavioural change.
Focusing on the large-scale out-of-home element made the issue – and its simple solution – more tangible.
“It is a real-world problem. We need a real-world presence that just went beyond life,” Lloyd says.
The oversize absurdity of the campaign got people talking. It became shareable content as people took pictures and posted about it.
This extended the reach further than just the popular train stations and streets of Auckland.
Lloyd says that despite having a small budget, results show the campaign landed. Three months after it finished, at least 137,000 people had picked up the stickers and used them regularly.
That translates to just under 5 million tonnes of food being diverted from landfill.
If you’re trying to picture what that looks like, it’s enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools, or cover the field of Eden Park to a depth of 60cm.
Food waste is a global issue and can be tackled in different ways – TBWA\ opted for a stomach-churning campaign that went bad for the greater good.
“It was aiming to make you shocked and feel bad. Just for a second though, before immediately presenting you with the solution. We didn’t want you to leave the ad feeling guilty forever,” says Garguilo.
“We want you believe in the power that there’s something you can do about it.”
This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
