Love Food Hate Waste · RY · 2019-2022
Tiny changes, huge consequences
Food waste is one of the most significant and least understood contributors to environmental damage in the UK. The budget was small. The ambition wasn't. Over three years, we helped Love Food Hate Waste shift behaviour at national scale — not through a big campaign idea, but through the smallest possible interventions in the right places.
Strategy · Behaviour Change · Campaigns · Sustainability
2019-2022
BEHAVIOURAL STRATEGY
CAMPAIGN CONCEPT AND DEVELOPMENT
NUDGE ARCHITECTURE
SOCIAL · DIGITAL · PRINT
WEBSITE AND ONGOING CONTENT STRATEGY
COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING
THE STORY
Spoiled Rotten
THE SITUATION
Food waste sits in the shadow of recycling — less visible, less discussed, less likely to appear on a government target or a supermarket pledge. But the scale of the problem is extraordinary: the overproduction, processing, and disposal of food that never gets eaten contributes to emissions, resource depletion, and economic waste at a level most people have no idea about. The assumption that wasted food simply composts away is one of the most widespread and costly misconceptions in the whole sustainability space.
Love Food Hate Waste needed to move the needle on behaviour — with minimal budget and maximum strategic efficiency.
THE INSIGHT
The problem wasn't that people didn't care about food waste. It was that they didn't know it was a problem worth caring about, and even if they did, they had no clear sense of what to do differently. The strategic insight was that this wasn't a campaign problem — it was an architecture problem. Grand messaging about the scale of food waste would bounce off people the same way it always had. What actually changes behaviour is removing the need to think about it at all: the smallest possible action, with the most disproportionate effect.
THE APPROACH
We reframed the brief away from persuasion and toward facilitation. Rather than asking people to care more, we gave them tiny, specific, almost effortless things to change — fridge temperature, portion habits, storage decisions — that made a force multiplier difference when adopted at scale. Classic nudge logic: identify the lever that requires the least effort and produces the most downstream impact, then make it as easy as possible to pull.
The 'Spoiled Rotten' campaign gave this strategy a creative platform: using the language of food going off to talk about habits going wrong, running across social, digital, and print alongside a dedicated website built around practical, low-friction guidance. The ambition was never a single campaign moment — it was a sustained architecture of small prompts that accumulated into genuine behaviour change.
The results, tracked through government figures over the engagement period, speak to what happens when strategy finds the right lever: a 21% reduction in UK food waste between 2019 and 2022, with an estimated £6.5 billion saved and 3.4 million tonnes of CO2 avoided annually. A government-assessed benefit-cost ratio of 250:1.
THE WORK COVERED