Hellmann's smart jar won over consumers, here's why
Hellmann's and Ogilvy UK have won the Food and Drink category at The Drum Awards for PR. Here is the award-winning case study.
Check out the award-winning campaign
Every year more than 4.5 million tonnes of perfectly good food goes to waste in our homes. This costs the average family upwards of £700 a year – money few of us can afford to waste. This was a problem ripe for solving by a brand whose purpose is “make taste, not waste”.
One of the unknown contributors to this waste came out in a recent study, which indicated millions of fridges in UK homes are too warm, causing some foods to spoil up to three days faster than if they were chilled to below 5℃. Given there’s a jar of Hellmann’s in most UK fridges, we spotted our opportunity. To mark Food Waste Action Week, we created a specially designed jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise that tells consumers when their fridge is at the optimum temperature to keep food fresher for longer.
We used thermochromic ink - an ink that only appears at a certain temperature - to create a new label featuring custom illustrations that changed to indicate when a fridge was set at the optimal temperature. Our nationwide, multi-channel campaign was kicked off by influencers across TikTok and Instagram.
Prototypes were sent to key opinion forming media, Hellmann’s fans and food waste campaigners to raise awareness around checking fridge temperatures in a bid to reduce food waste on a national level. The eye-catching jar became a catalyst for conversation amongst Hellmann’s target demographic and the press. But this campaign wasn’t about driving conversation, success meant changing behaviour.
Post-campaign, 66% knew the optimal fridge temperature to make food last longer (hopefully you do too after this) – and 80% of consumers said they'd commit to checking their fridge temperature. That represents a total of 3.6 million tons of food from potentially being wasted – equating to £1.1bn of savings for British families each year.