This Colombian design agency deployed fruit stickers to fight food waste
One Colombian agency, working for a mid-sized supermarket chain, realised that they could help solve the colossal problem of food waste by using a ubiquitous piece of everyday design: fruit stickers.
In a project for Makro, VML Colombia designed a series of stickers for five different fruits and vegetables. Each sticker offered three or four use cases, dependent on the item’s stage of ripeness and aligned to a corresponding colour wheel. A green banana is delicious fried, a yellow one makes great ice cream, and the sugar in a black one is perfect for turning into a cupcake. A light red tomato is really good in a salad, but when it turns deep crimson, it’s the right time for it to be blitzed into a soup. All this information was condensed into a 1 inch x 1 inch square, and added to individual bits of fruit and veg across Makro’s stores.
Simple as this sounds, the client didn’t bite immediately. In fact, the project was slowed, then rejected. It was only after it was pitched to a rival and tested in-store that Makro rolled it out. Happily, the results were astonishing – 70 tons of food waste was saved from both stores and homes, and each piece of fruit or veg was kept for an average of six days longer. Crucially, pieces that carried the sticker outsold those without. This project won two Wood Pencils, as well as three Graphite Pencils in Sustainable Commerce, Direct (Printed Materials) and Experiential (Creative Use of Budget). Its highest honour, the Yellow Pencil, was won in the category of Promotional Packaging Design, proving that even in the smallest and most everyday of places, there’s still room for significant innovation.
“If there are designers that see this and have a supermarket as an account, please use the stickers. Please add your logo. Makro is not going to sue you, but it's going to help the world. I'm inviting the Tescos and Walmarts to copy this initiative.”
A lesser design would have given in to the desire to add a link to the website, or digital integration, or some other complication. But by sticking to simplicity, a truly singular piece of design could be produced. Chief Creative Officer Juan José Posada describes the process: “Fruits and vegetables have a life cycle, and that is explained in a very beautiful way by nature. We just needed to mimic that. It's very easy to explain now, but it took months. We had lots of designs that were a disaster, and we needed to go back to basics three or four times because for some reason we tend to overcomplicate things. [The] client or a person would say that if we had a QR code, we could have lots more information. We resisted that, because what we wanted is for the sticker to be understood by an eight-year-old kid or a 70-year-old lady and everyone in between. You need to have that simplicity.”
Despite pushing so hard for this project, Posada is remarkably unprecious about the work: to the point of hoping that others will take this idea for themselves. Mentioning that the UN estimates that 45% of fruit and veg is still thrown away, he says: “If there are designers that see this and have a supermarket as an account, please use the stickers. Please add your logo. Makro is not going to sue you, but it's going to help the world. I'm inviting the Tescos and Walmarts to copy this initiative.”