The Eat in Colour campaign has exceeded expectation in its first year, by reaching nearly 85 million people through newspapers, radio, TV and the internet.
As it announced its year-one results, the industry’s promotional effort kicked off its second year this week with a fun national media push centred on the UK’s soap operas.
“In terms of the actual reach and coverage of the campaign, we have beaten targets for this year that were set at 80m,” said EiC chairman Anthony Levy. “We achieved some 219 individual bits of coverage in print, radio and TV media and 15m readers online. The general feedback from the industry is that we have got off to a good start and we are attracting new sponsors.
“As people see the campaign being more and more successful, they want to become involved. We want to encourage that and get more people to put their money in as everyone is benefiting from it.”
Levy said two new major sponsors are due to announce that they have signed up very shortly, one is an importer and distributor and the second represents a specific product.
Bray Leino, the agency that runs the campaign for the EiC board on behalf of the Fresh Produce Consortium, initially set the Eat in Colour £5 challenge, which called for shoppers to switch just £5 of their weekly grocery bill from convenience foods to fruit and veg. Instant support came from celebrity chef Brian Turner, who encouraged people to eat in colour on UKTV Food and across local radio stations when the campaign launched in January. The campaign to increase consumption received a further boost when Terry Wogan shared the aphrodisiac properties of fresh produce with his Radio 2 listeners on Valentine’s Day.
One of the most encouraging aspects, according to Bray Leino was that the nine families from across the UK, who struggled to eat enough fruit and vegetables made permanent changes to their eating habits after taking up the Eat in Colour challenge.
The campaign’s chocolate offsetting scheme over Easter registered record numbers of visitors to the site and made headlines in The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star, as well as 15 regional papers and mentions on 12 regional radio stations, not to mention in FPJ!
July and August saw a roadshow and colourful snacking ideas, as well as the Colour Me Beautiful guide, which showed how fresh produce consumption “helps you look your best”.
“A lot of media has been very keen to pick up on some of the more humorous and quirky ideas often linked in to calendar events such as the Easter chocolate offsetting,” said Levy. “These have really delivered tremendous coverage and been a great success.” However, he admitted that coverage in longer lead-time magazines was disappointing. “We didn’t get as much coverage in this area as we had hoped for, but that is to be expected in the first year and we are speaking to people in the magazines about year two now.”
The second year started with a story fed to the national and regional media on fresh produce consumption in soap operas. After tracking the eating and drinking habits of the UK’s three biggest soaps for a month, research by the Eat in Colour team revealed that the Eastenders cast has the worst diet of all, Coronation Street fared little better, and the largest consumers of fresh produce reside in Emmerdale.
During the month, the best Eastenders could manage in the fruit and veg stakes was a meagre 10 portions, residents of Emmerdale got through 59 servings, with side salads instead of chips, strawberries, bananas and even an organic vegetable box all featuring. Coronation Street dwellers only managed 24 portions of fruit and veg a month, compared to 128 cups of tea.
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