Hellmann’s: Reducing Food Waste
Hellmann’s Fridge Night
Household food waste accounts for 61% of global food waste. Behaviour change, if designed well, can have a significant impact. Nobody wants to waste food, but sometimes you just don’t know what to do with what’s already in the fridge.
The Fridge Night programme was built on that insight. Together with MarketingMums and BEworks, I helped ground the programme logic in the science of how habits actually form and change. The result was a weekly Use-Up Day ritual and a simple recipe framework (“Flexipes”) that turned left-behinds into a starting point rather than a problem.
I designed the evaluation studies and co-authored the published impact evaluation. The pilot ran across more than 2,400 households in Canada and the US. Self-reported food waste fell by up to 46%.
Behaviour change at scale works when the design is right – when it removes friction rather than relying on information alone, and when the assumptions underneath it have been tested rather than taken for granted.
Knorr: Improving nutrition
Knorr’s Follow in my Green Food Steps
Iron deficiency is one of the leading causes of preventable disease globally. Knorr’s programme aimed to address it by changing a specific cooking behaviour: getting Nigerian mothers and daughters to add green leafy vegetables and iron-fortified bouillon cubes to their daily cooking.
I led the impact evaluation: a controlled study enrolling 600 mother-daughter pairs across two towns – one received the programme, one did not. It measured not just whether behaviour changed, but what was driving the change.
The results were specific and honest. In the programme town, 41% of mothers adopted the behaviour of adding greens to stews – against 5% in the control town. Cube use in stews was already near universal, leaving no room for improvement. But the evaluation revealed an unexpected finding: cube use in soups increased significantly, thus showing the programme’s impact extended beyond its original target behaviour.
Read the full paper in International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity
Can a clean label sway choice?
A product team was convinced they had a problem. Consumers claimed they didn’t want a particular ingredient. The plan was to invest in a new clean label ingredient.
I convinced the team to look at the underlying assumptions more closely. I designed a study to test whether the ingredient was actually influencing purchase behaviour: what they did when choosing a product, rather than what they claimed in qualitative research.
The finding was unambiguous: consumers weren’t reading the ingredient list. They were responding to the product itself: taste, familiarity, habit. The ingredient they’d objected to in surveys had no measurable effect on actual choice.
Knowing what people actually do, rather than what they say they do, is the starting point for making sound investment decisions.
Can plant-based be indulgent?
Two questions were on the table. What sustainability message should a plant-based product lead with and what packaging design signals sustainability and indulgence?
We designed two studies to find out. The insights were counterintuitive. In the first study, consumers responded most strongly to messages about farming practices. Not animal welfare. Certainly not carbon footprint figures.
The indulgence finding was more nuanced. It was possible to increase the perceived indulgence of a plant-based product through the product design but only to a point. Push the indulgence too far and liking scores went down, even though the product was exactly the same. The product couldn’t deliver on the expectation being set, and the gap created a contrast effect that worked against it.
The obvious solutions, carbon footprint claims, green designs, verbal sustainability, were not the answer. What worked was logical with hindsight, but only became apparent by looking at what people do, rather than what they say.