Situation:

Food waste is a global problem and Sweden is no exception. 38% of food in Swedish households is wasted and contrary to popular opinion, households are responsible for more food waste than companies. A reason being is that people often throw away products that have passed their over-cautious best before dates, without smelling or tasting them first.

Brief:

Coop, Sweden's second largest grocery chain, known for its sustainable practice, wanted to raise awareness about food waste in an engaging way, and by doing so, become perceived as the most environmentally-conscious Swedish brand within FMCG.

Objectives:

5 million earned-media-impressions (half of Sweden’s population)

20 news-articles

80% of all media-coverage should mention “use our senses to decrease food waste” in connection to Coop.

Interaction:

Create a physical interaction with the audience that could be evaluated through tangible results.

If people stopped relying on best-before dates, food waste would decrease significantly. What if we could find a way to remind people to smell and taste the food before throwing it away?

We created Old Milk, a perfume that smells just like milk gone bad. Making it the first scent in the world people can use as a reference to know when their milk is drinkable or not.

The perfume works as an unexpected way to remind people to use their sense of smell to determine when a product is ready for the trash. To increase surprise factors, we packaged the new fragrance like a premium branded perfume.

By being funny rather than preachy, Coop managed to spark interest in food waste around the world, in a way that’s totally new in sustainability, earning attention from our target audience and beyond.

Our target-audience was Swedes age 25-55, since many are environmentally conscious and have kids, which makes their food consumption relevant to target.

Many companies are reactive and focus their sustainability work on risk minimizing. As a result, the communication often ends up being preachy and easy to shrug off.

We needed an earned-at-the-core idea which would generate genuine engagement and interest amongst media and the public. Our approach was to create something unexpected and proactive, which would create an emotional reaction.

To increase the shock factor and campaign impact, our approach was to piggyback on typical premium-perfume aesthetics in all our units and media-choices.

By being funny rather than preachy, Coop managed to spark interest in food waste around the world, in a way that’s totally new in sustainability and earned attention across our target audience and beyond.

The first step was to create the perfume. The scent of Old Milk was created by a professional perfumer, who recreated the smell of old, undrinkable milk. The development took 10 months.

To increase the shock factor and campaign impact, our approach was to piggyback on typical perfume aesthetics in all our units and media-choices.

We launched the campaign through earned media and PR-activation, sending out the perfume with key message to influencers, journalists and opinion leaders.

The sustainability message was further amplified via a variety of channels, including smelly print ads, billboards and interactive street events.

Since the sustainability debate has a global perspective, and to increase interest in Swedish media, our strategy was a global media approach. We also wanted opinion leaders to experience Old Milk and share their thoughts and reactions on relevant social media, seeing as our audience is very active there.

-250 million earned media impressions (compared to objective 5 million impressions)

-213 media articles in 25 countries

-8,000+ scent samples requested via campaign microsite in week 1

-50,000+ visitors to the campaign microsite in week 1

-96% of coverage mentioned we should start using our senses before throwing away food, in connection to Coop – proof that the campaign message was impossible to miss or misunderstand.

-Milk sales up by 4.5%…but as long as it wasn’t wasted, that’s ok by us!

-Global interest: Samples requested from Germany, France, The Netherlands, USA, India, Australia and China, as well as Sweden.

-Coop brand perception as a modern company that takes responsibility for the environment, up 5% in Q3 compared to Q2 (with no other sustainability campaigns running). This outperforms any previous purpose campaign by Coop.

- Coop named 'Sweden's most sustainable brand and Sweden's greenest brand.’ 7th Dec 2018