If you found yourself increasing your intake of fruit and vegetables last year after seizing inspiration from a double-page tabloid spread, or offsetting your chocolate footprint at Easter against your fresh produce consumption, then you are one of the millions of people to have felt the impact of Eat in Colour (EiC).
After plenty of to-ing and fro-ing between industry top dogs, the generic promotional campaign was finally rolled out last January, with PR agency Bray Leino running the show on behalf of the Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC), overseen by the EiC board.
The promotion set out with a three-year budget - the second year of activities is now well underway - and is attracting new sponsors all the time, including three major companies who only signed up to the scheme in December. G’s Marketing, Emmett UK and Bayer CropScience are the latest in a line of supporters to throw their weight behind the consumption project.
The sponsors have been actively involved in supporting the initiative, EiC chairman Anthony Levy tells FPJ, and many have interpreted the brand in their own way. “For example, JP Fresh has displayed the logo on its trucks,” he says. “In 2008, we are looking to give EiC a presence on retail shelves.”
The consumption crusade has gone from strength to strength since its inception, according to Dom Lane from Bray Leino. “One of the hardest challenges with a pure PR campaign is the effort you have to put in at the beginning to build momentum, to attract both the industry and consumers,” he says. “We kicked off at the start of last year and since then things have snowballed - now we are reaping the benefits, and there is more to come. We are fast becoming a resource for distributing a healthy, tasty message.”
But not everyone was on board with the EiC concept in its initial stages, adds Levy. “In the early days, there were a number of people who were sceptical about whether or not we would get coverage; but we have achieved a very high level of coverage, and our growing relationship with the red tops, especially The Sun, is critical in reaching large numbers of people who are an untapped, potential fresh produce market. It is really positive to think that in a busy media world, the EiC campaign has appealed to the tabloids.”
Punters can expect more of the same - and added extras - in 2008, says Lane. “We are continuing to work with the theme of easy, tasty, quick fresh produce ideas that fit into busy lifestyles, rather than making people feel that we are battering them with healthy eating information.
“We are extending our reach to our key audience, the trolley drivers - parents doing their weekly shop, choosing what goes into the basket - as well as young people, and we are also looking at our next target audience: the UK workforce.”
This year, budding young Michael Owens will be taught that fresh produce is their fuel, thanks to EiC’s new youth football project, Eat in Colour United. “Working with the English Schools’ Football Association, we are trying to get across the idea of helping footballers get match fit with fruit and veg,” says Lane.
The campaign is also rolling out a Healthy Eating Badge in conjunction with the Scout Association. Youngsters aged between six and eight who attend Beavers, one of the association’s movements, can earn the badge, which involves making snacks and sandwiches using fruit and veg. “The boys and girls at Beavers are of a perfect age to engage with fresh produce on their own. The Scout Association has been marvellous,” says Lane. “As the groups of children work towards the badge, we’ll do PR in their town to create even further exposure. The badge also allows us to access children’s key influencers - not just their parents, but also their teachers and other authority figures. The PR campaign for the badge will involve us asking the kids to fill out a little food diary, assessing what they and their families eat, to send back to us. This means we should be looking at some pretty interesting data later in the year, and it’s the first time the industry will see a child’s point of view of how much fruit and vegetables they consume.”
But beware - adults are also set to receive the EiC treatment. As companies start making resolutions in the new financial year, EiC will unveil a raft of new ideas set to get the UK’s workforce to switch their crisps and biscuits for fruit and veg. “We will be showing bosses how to make it easy for their employees to munch on fruit and healthy snacks - after all, a healthy, happy workforce is much more productive,” says Lane.
The Biscuit or Bowl project will involve a ten-point charter distributed to employers, and will see EiC put together a selection of case studies across a cross-section of the working population, charting their trials and tribulations in sticking to a healthy diet. Lane says: “The charter is a prompt for those in charge of staff restaurants to make the right decisions, to encourage bosses to put fruit bowls on boardroom tables, etc, and to make people think about what snacks they put in their briefcase. This should open up opportunities for suppliers in the foodservice sector.”
With sales of fruit and vegetables showing a healthy rise over the last year, Levy and Lane believe that EiC and the media attention it has attracted must be having an impact somewhere along the line. “Our ambition is not for EiC to be a brand in its own right - rather, we want to change people’s behaviour and increase consumption, make sure we get our message across and leave a legacy long after we have all gone,” says Levy.
EiC aims to complement the raft of other consumer campaigns already in the public domain. “We want to grow the overall climate for consumption, so that individual products and produce companies can build on that grounding and boost their own market share,” says Levy.
Lane agrees: “EiC is designed to get people enthused about fresh produce in general, and then at that point the specialist campaigns kick in - it’s a perfect chain.”
The EiC website has provided an easily accessible format for people to seek recipes and tips on how to up their produce intake. “It is crucial to have an up-to-date website which we keep relevant,” says Lane. “But it is just one spoke in a big wheel. Activities like the ice cream van we drove around British seaside resorts last summer are also a useful tool for reaching out. The van proved to be an uplifting experience for members of the EiC team; the youngsters were actually very receptive to new products, whereas some of the mums and dads were more reticent. Afterwards we had great feedback, with people ringing us up to find out about the recipes.”
Chocolate offsetting, which EiC rolled out last Easter as an exercise to help people counteract their Easter egg consumption, and its subsequent Christmas offsetting sequel, were further great successes, according to Lane. “For more fun, occasion-led ideas, watch this space,” he added.
EiC HEADS FOR BERLIN
Eat in Colour (EiC) will take to the aisles of Fruit Logistica this year, with a presence on new sponsor Bayer CropScience’s stand.
“As one of our partners, Bayer’s commitment was to provide a platform for EiC representatives to meet new people in the industry,” says Dom Lane from PR agency Bray Leino. “EiC chairman Anthony Levy will be in Berlin, treading the boards and looking for new supporters.
“We welcome input from any sector of the industry, and Berlin is key to this in that it gathers together every element of the supply chain. EiC is of course a UK campaign, but the exhibition will give us a chance to meet companies who export their produce here - produce that we then promote. This is our chance to spread the word and meet new sponsors.”
“It is also a chance to fly the flag for the Fresh Produce Consortium and its EiC sponsors, to show how proud we are of what we have achieved,” adds Levy.
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