Changing behaviours to reduce food waste

Summary

Knowing the detrimental effect food waste has on the planet and consequently climate change, WRAP wanted to change consumer habits and help reduce the 6.5 million tonnes of food waste in the UK every year. Through paid, owned and earned media we built a rounded campaign that leveraged the emotive association with climate change to reach our audience of ‘food wasters’, who were most likely to engage with our campaign. In a short timeframe we delivered significant reach and beat our target of getting 55% of people exposed to the campaign to actively take action and 4.4million people to change their behaviour and reduce their food waste.  

Challenge

Most of the UK population care about the environment, yet there is a very real intention-action gap, where consumers know they should be doing something, but few actually do. In a crowded environment where consumers are becoming desensitised to the constant messages around food waste and climate change, we looked to: 

  1. Create emotive stand out to ensure cut-through and drive consumer action.
  2. Make it simple for time-poor consumers to take action.
  3. Create a social norm using the principles of behavioural science to reinforce and normalise that wasting food is not common practice.

Solution

The campaign was fully integrated, with the messaging ‘Wasting Food Feeds Climate Change’ running through all communications, and delivered within our strategic framework: 

  1.  Emotive stand out: We created a 10ft planet from 165kg of food waste, equivalent to the average food waste generated by a single UK household annually, to visualise the problem and link it back to climate change.
  2.  Making it simple: We revealed new statistics around consumers’ attitudes towards defrosting and freezing food and its environmental impact.
  3. Creating a Social Norm: Partnering with MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace, we utilised his appeal with our audience, supplemented with paid-for regional interviews. This was supported by content from 32 influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, to drive home the message about the impact of food waste and the benefits of freezing food.

Results

WRAP’s ambition for this campaign was to get 50% of people to actively change their behaviours to reduce food waste. By following these 3 clear strategic principles, not only did we increase people’s awareness of the link between food waste and climate change growing this from 37% of people to 49%, but 55% of the people that saw the campaign have taken action to reduce their food waste, which is the equivalent to 4.4 million people changing their behaviour for the better.