BeforeA national problem that seemed too big to shift, on a small budget.
AfterBehaviour change at national scale, from the smallest interventions.
Food waste lives in the shadow of recycling. Less visible, less talked about, and honestly misunderstood. Most people didn’t realise it was a problem worth caring about, let alone what to do differently, and the budget was small for a national problem.
I came to see it as an architecture problem, not a campaign problem. Big messages about scale just bounce off people. What changes behaviour is taking away the need to think: the smallest possible action with the most outsized effect.
So we moved from persuading to making it easy. Tiny, specific things like the temperature of your fridge, your portion sizes and how you store food, which add up to a huge difference when enough people do them. The Spoiled Rotten platform ran across social, digital and print, with a practical website behind it, and we kept going for three years. Not one big moment, a steady run of small nudges.
