Follow me to be healthy with Europe, the health campaign launched by Freshfel Europe, Aprifel, and the European Commission in 2019, has celebrated its first birthday.
The initiative aims to encourage young Europeans to increase their consumption of fruit and vegetables to a minimum of 400g a day, to improve and ultimately transform millennials’ dietary habits.
Described as a digital-first initiative, the Europe-wide campaign has generated over 32m impressions on social media in its first twelve months.
Through collaborations with social media influencers, such as Gaëlle Prudencio, Luisa Ambrosini and Carlos Rios, the campaign has shown that eating a diet high in fruit and vegetables is not only healthy but also easy to achieve and fun to experiment with.
Using the hashtag #400gChallenge, followers are ‘challenged’ to include more fruit and vegetables in their daily diet.
These challenges are promoted by monthly infographics, tips, and videos, which showcase the health benefits of fruit and vegetables in an engaging and relatable format across the campaign’s six social media channels.
“It was a natural choice to make this a digital-first campaign - on average, our target audience spends more than a third of their awake hours online,” said Philippe Binard, Freshfel Europe’s general delegate.
The online side of the campaign, which runs until the end of 2021, is complemented by its presence at events. At the launch event at the Eurockéennes festival in Belfort in July 2019, a tonne of fresh fruit and vegetables was distributed to festivalgoers.
Visitors to the campaign’s stand were also able to speak to a dietician about the importance of fruit and vegetable consumption.
“From speaking to visitors at our stand, it was clear that many young people weren’t aware of the wide range of health benefits of a diet high in fruit and vegetables,“ said Mathilde Fléchard, Aprifel’s European project manager.
