Help the Tafel foodbank generate donations so they can support the needy with food.

The hand-shaped fork is an everyday object turned into a message: I am hungry. Give me something to eat. It can be understood all around the world and by people of every age and therefore has the potential to change the way people eat. Because every time someone uses the fork at home, it reminds him that having food is nothing to be taken for granted – and, of course, that there is the Tafel foodbank, who he can always donate to.

The main reason people don’t donate? The effort. You have to watch posters that make you feel guilty, read leaflets that cost time, visit websites, scan QR-codes and arrange transactions via your bank account. Our aim: To reduce the effort to zero. Or better: to minus one. How? We created a desireable product – a fork in the shape of a hand – and handed it out in exchange for a deposit along with the food on gourmet festivals. Now the effort was demanding your money back. Which caused the first edition to be sold out in just a month.

The only response possible to our Helping Hands was to keep one. We produced 30,000 forks with production- and material costs of about one Euro per fork. The deposit was two Euros a piece, but many gave more, so we ended up with an average of about 2.7 Euros per fork, which means 80,000 Euros, or 50,000 Euros of pure profit. Our target figure of 12,000 Euros for the season was cracked within the first week, and it took only three more to sell out the entire first edition.