Makro – Serving suggestion stickers / Ripe fruit / Life Extending Stickers (2023) Colombia

Opportunities that meet all the criteria of driving awareness and conversion, doing good – here wasting less food – and looking effortless are rare.

This idea ticks all those boxes by utilizing an often-overlooked in-store media space to drive behavior change. The simple and effective design is praiseworthy as it seamlessly achieves its purpose without drawing attention to itself.

According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Colombian National Department of Planning, Colombians waste approximately 6.1 million tons of food annually, with fruits and vegetables contributing 40% to this waste.

One of the reasons behind this massive amount of waste is the misconception that ripe produce is unusable, resulting in a short life cycle of fruits and vegetables.

To combat this attitude, Dutch-owned cash-and-carry wholesaler Makro and Grey Colombia, Bogotá, created stickers featuring recipe suggestions tailored to the degree of ripeness of fruits and vegetables. The Life Extending Stickers are designed to blend in with the usual branded stickers, imitating the color of each food item at different stages of its ripeness. For instance, a banana’s sticker goes from green to yellow to brown and finally black, with a serving or cooking suggestion over each color – in the banana’s case, the text reads (in order of ripeness) fried, ice cream, tempura, cupcake.