TETRA PAK - HEALTHY DRINKS@SCHOOL CSR & PUBLIC AFFAIRS CAMPAIGN

CHALLENGE

Tetra Pak, the world's leading food processing and packaging solutions company, prides itself on working closely with its customers and suppliers to provide safe food. We were approached to assist them to develop a comprehensive stakeholder strategy to position Tetra Pak and its customers in the Flemish Minister of Education’s phase-out policy to ban or reduce the consumption of soft drinks in schools.

This included the creation of awareness about the sustainability and eco-friendliness of carton packaging and reinforcing Tetra Pak’s ‘good packaging for a good life’ positioning. At the same time, we had to support Tetra Pak’s client relationships through the creation of sales opportunities in secondary schools across Belgium.

UPR’s APPROACH

UPR involved Tetra Pak in the preparatory discussions for the phase-out policy at ministerial level, involving representatives of the food & beverage industry, schools and health organisations.

In order to determine the size  of the support base for the phase-out policy, we conducted a survey amongst approximately 1000 scholars aged between 12 and 18. They were questioned on their opinions about the phase-out policy of sugared drinks in schools, how it would affect their consumer behaviour, how much money they spend on sugared drinks at school, how they perceive the importance of packaging, etc. The results of the survey were presented to the media. We next set up a mini experiment: we arranged a healthy pop-up bar where scholars received free samples of Alpro and Vita Coco drinks, presented in Tetra Pak packaging, during the break.

We organized a stakeholder round table on the survey results to brainstorm how to persuade schools and scholars to choose healthy drinks in eco-friendly packages. This directly led to a nudging experiment which we arranged at three secondary schools with the support of professor Siegfried Dewitte of the Behaviour Engineering department of the KU Leuven. Purpose was to influence scholars’ consumption behaviour and to determine what schools can do (organizationally, educationally and practically) to urge students to choose non-sugared drinks in eco-friendly packages more consciously.

 

EXPERTISE

In the execution of this campaign we firstly harnessed our substantial skills and expertise in corporate sustainability communication as well as public affairs and stakeholder relations, to engage with the Minister of Education and with public health stakeholders through preparatory discussions to elicit statements of commitment to ban sugared soft drinks in secondary schools.

Next we relied on our client relations expertise to provide support in this field by introducing alternative ‘healthy’ drinks in schools whilst simultaneously creating new sales opportunities.

We finally engaged our Product PR knowledge and skills to create awareness about the sustainability and eco-friendly nature of carton packaging.