06: Hellmans D&AD Brief - Thoughts and Ideas

To get up to scratch below is the thoughts and ideas taken off of elliots blog. 

Whilst I was away Elliot, Bethan and Beth started up the Hellmans food waste brief. After cycleing though a number of ideas they came back to one which was a food waste food truck. This was actually a project I had previously started and even pitching it to Dines within the career week as a concept that could be made a reality. For this reason Elliot asked me if I would like to join forces instead of separately pursuing the same project. I was delighted to join as I always preffer to work collaboratly. This did not come without its complications as four graphic designers do not allow for a huge amount of skill variation. However we came up with individual roles, paired roles and activities to do as a team. 

Starting Hellmans D&AD with elliot, bethan and beth. 

The Brief


Create a Hellmann’s branded device, publication or service that addresses the issue of food wastage.

Your design should be a response to a point in the supply chain where food is often wasted:

- In the home, such as leftover food that’s overlooked or left behind when people go on holiday.

-In restaurants or stores, when over-ordered or expired goods get binned. 

Choose either the home, the store or the restaurant as the focus for your solution. Hellman's Brief Brainstorm Initial Ideas


1. An app on how to buy and portion food correctly so that it reduces food waste. Input recipes off the internet, the app will then ask a series of short questions: how many people eating? big eaters? and will change the recipe amounts accordingly for each individual recipe. Also tells you what you can do with your leftovers to turn into meals.

2. Create an advertising campaign that photographs food made up from common leftovers in the household. These could be then displayed across all social media platforms. Emphasise the importance of leftover food still being completely edible. Maybe this could be made into a competition to see who creates the most creative meal in the hope to engage more people in the campaign.

3. Show the whole process of farm to store in an easy, digestible manner for consumers. By showing the masses of land space that's used to grow these crops but then blanking out the land's worth of food that actually gets thrown away out of the crops produced. This would make for an impactful visual to inform consumers more about the mass amounts of food that goes to waste.

Group Brainstorm

Idea 1 - Common Leftover Ingredients

A campaign that emphasises the usefulness of common leftover ingredients towards the end of a food cycle. Sometimes ingredients are completely discarded because of the lack of knowledge on how they can be used to create meals in conjunction with each other. A quick example of this could be using the stalk of a broccoli and the remains of a piece of cheese, e.g. blue stilton, brie etc. to create a soup of sorts.

This product to this campaign could be a recipe book or an app that has combinations of common leftover ingredients in the fridge/ freezer that work well together as a meal.

As a campaign visual this could include images of before and after, whereby the scrappy looking leftovers would be pictured on their own then an after picture would be taken of the finished meal. Showing how less appealing looking food can be utilised rather than being thrown away.

Idea 2 - Dating App Campaign

Working on an idea to go with a playful tone of voice that would be the centre of this campaign. Hellman's would play the role of Cupid in what is to be the matchmaking service between fresh but wonky, not fit for the shelves, produce. The campaign would be about bringing together leftovers and wonky vegetables that normally wouldn't be considered fit to eat and creating recipes from them for consumers to use. Essentially creating relationships between foods in a playful campaign. Using catchy slogans and bold imagery to create a striking set of visuals. E.g. 'go from a 2/10 to a 10/10' showing a before of the produce looking slightly less than appealing and then showing a picture perfect bowl of food that would be considered delightful to consumers.

Idea 3 - Taste the Difference Campaign

This would be a campaign based on creating meals from foods that would typically be discarded by both suppliers and supermarkets that are considered too ugly or wonky to be sold to consumers. Up to roughly 50% of vegetables grown are discarded before they even get to the consumer as they aren't seen as suitable for the supermarket shelves.

To eliminate or at the very least reduce the extent to which this happens, the campaign would centre around creating meals both from 'wonky' vegetables and 'regular' vegetables and asking consumers to taste the difference. Emphasising the idea that there is nothing wrong with produce that may not always look as pretty as others; in the hope to increase the possibility of selling more wonky looking vegetables in the future.

There would be an online campaign to promote this happening, which would utilise clever wording and imagery to catch the consumers eye. Using slogans such as..

'It's whats on the inside that counts' 

'Don't judge a book by it's cover'

etc.

Some inspiration for the campaign was along the lines of the Dove 'real beauty' campaign which puts a focus on every type of woman being accepted as opposed to just slim, pretty women. I feel this is something we could take inspiration from and put into the context of fresh produce, showing that all vegetables are accepted not just the pretty ones.

Idea 4 - Wonky Vegetable Food Truck

Expanding on from previous ideas to base a campaign around wonky vegetables in the hope to increase consumers awareness of them and the difference it can make consuming them, we came up with the idea to create a wonky vegetable food truck.

The truck would go around visiting wherever possible, universities, festivals etc. to sell food that is made from collected wonky vegetables that would typically be discarded from suppliers and supermarkets into the bin. The aim would be to not only make use of the food but also to market the importance of using produce like this that would typically be taken to a landfill in the hope to educate consumers about food waste in general also. The menu would be constantly updated with new and innovative recipes that utilise the abundance of food.

After discussing our idea amongst ourselves and others, our strongest idea seemed to be the food truck idea for a number of reasons; it both makes use of food that would typically be wasted, whilst also educating customers and hopefully inspiring them to go home and do this themselves.

We further discussed this idea and developed it further..

This idea we felt was hitting the demographic we wanted to be that students through to adults. We thought because of this the locations that the truck visits would be also important, e.g. food festivals, festivals, universities and potentially other justified destinations. The food truck itself would be a service (a format that is specified within the brief as an option).

The idea behind this campaign we feel follows inline with how Hellmans want to be percieved to the public through their brand values and attitudes towards food. On one of their webpages they mention that..

"To us, taste is everything – it’s the reason Hellmann’s exists – everything we make is designed to make food taste better."

"We don’t have anything against awesome food pics (we take awesome food pics ourselves). We just believe the greatest pleasure you can get from food comes from how it tastes."

This emphasises our reason for trying to reduce food waste by using wonky produce because as long as this 'imperfect' food tastes equally as good as the percieved 'ideal' food, it follows inline with what they feel is important within food; it's taste.

This idea falls inline with some of their current brand missions, for example with their ketchup:

"About 13% of all tomato crops are thrown away, simply because they aren’t red enough to go into ketchup."

"That’s why we’ve made a special ketchup that uses red and green tomatoes."
Hellman's aren't ones for waste, hence why their tomato ketchup uses tomatoes regardless if they aren't red enough which ultimately reduces food waste of tomatoes.

Possibilities with the idea:

- Opportunity for there to be guest chef recipes; recipes created by famous chefs that would be displayed on the menu. An opportunity for chefs to promote a good cause and also bring about more awareness of the campaign as a whole.

- Playful copy for the campaign's visual identity e.g. Get Wonky. Using terminology that would often appeal to a younger audience. This could work great within a social media campaign, encourage people to post pictures of their food whether bought/ made from scratch with the hashtag #getwonky.

- For the visuals we could manually hand craft vegetables out of clay, paper etc. without putting too much of an emphasis on making them look perfect; adding to this wonky look.

- The food truck could potentially tour the country, with a tracker on the website showing where it will visit next. This would create anticipation and hopefully hype around the trucks presence wherever it might; furthering the audience reached with the campaign.

Thoughts on things needed within the campaign (collateral, brand indentity etc.):

Branding of the campaign

Art direction for posters 

Colours

Packaging of the food

Design of the truck

Menu design

Funky/ punny names for the food e.g. Disco Stew?

Vouchers?

Recipe of the day?

Schedule and to do list 

Our to do list within the next month