A 2023 survey uncovered a startling fact: Gen Z creates more food waste than any other generation in Canada (source: Chefs Plate). Additional social listening revealed that Gen Z discusses food waste online and engages with content relating to food waste at a lower rate than millennials and Gen X. In a nation with some of the highest food prices in the world, the average Canadian wastes $1352 of food annually, much of which goes to landfill, creating large amounts of greenhouse emissions.

With our platform of Make Taste, Not Waste, Hellmann’s needed to act. Our goal was to create an informative, entertaining campaign that would be shared virally to inspire millions of Gen Z Canadians to engage with food waste as an issue for the very first time – reducing their food waste and saving millions of tonnes of food from ending up in landfill.

Gen Z doesn't talk about food waste. We realized we had to sneak it into something that they do care about: sneakers. So we created ‘Refresh Kicks’: a campaign that saw Hellmann’s become the first non-shoe brand ever to release a pair of shoes created entirely from food waste. The sneakers, ‘Hellmann’s 1352’, are named for the $1352 of food the average Canadian wastes annually. We drew on Gen Z’s style and preferences to create a sneaker with unique appeal for them, maximizing conversation and social engagement.

We seeded our limited-edition pairs of ‘Hellmann’s 1352s’ among Canadian sneaker influencers across social platforms. Our limited edition sneakers created desirability and talkability, driving conversation between both our influencers who had them, and everyone else who did not.

Given that maximizing awareness of food waste was a key campaign goal, we defined our target audience broadly: Gen Z. Gen Z engages with sneaker-related content at the highest rate of any demographic, and leads sneaker discussion activity, purchase numbers and content creation online. 89% of Gen Z have bought sneakers in the last 12 months, and 33% of Gen Z men and 26% of Gen Z women consider themselves to be “sneakerheads” – a term for those obsessed with sneakers.

We partnered with Canada’s most popular sneaker influencers to capture the attention of Gen Z sneakerheads and casual sneaker fans alike. Through a phased campaign, we kept social engagement high across a four-week period: first, we teased the shoes to build buzz, then launched a full reveal, followed by ‘recipe content’, connecting the exact ingredients used to create the shoes to Hellmann’s leftover-saving ‘flexipes’ – our leftover-inspired recipes.

The sneakers were designed and created over six months between September 2023 and February 2024. Refresh Kicks launched in April 2024, with a phased social campaign running in April and May 2024. Both parts of the sneaker – the upper shoe and the outsole – were made from recycled and reclaimed food waste. Vegetables are the most-wasted food in Canada, accounting for 30% of food waste: so we constructed our upper shoe from 66% vegetable waste and corn – also in the top 10 most-wasted foods by weight. The outsole is made from sugarcane waste.

At every stage of the creative process – product design, shoe launch and the accompanying social campaign – we behaved exactly like a shoe brand in order to maximize intrigue, conversation and social engagement.

Immediately upon launching Refresh Kicks, the campaign went viral across Canada. It was picked up by 172 media outlets, and gained 66.4 million earned impressions in the first 24 hours alone. Overall, the campaign has achieved 1.2 billion total impressions to date, making Refresh Kicks the most successful social campaign in Hellmann’s history in Canada.

The campaign gained earned media across a wide variety of mediums and platforms, including daytime television shows, some of Canada’s largest radio stations, and widespread coverage on every popular social media platform.

In partnership with Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food charity, we launched a scheme that donated $10 every time someone entered an online, social competition to win a pair of ‘Hellmann’s 1352s’. Within the first week, there were more than 2,000 entries, leading to over 50,000 meals donated to thousands of Canadians suffering from food insecurity.