By letting people experience Norways growing food waste problem legally for the first time, the NGO Future In Our Hands managed to make The Norwegian Parliament legislate a new food waste law.

QR codes inside of the dumpster and "Deli employees" let people sign our petition for a new food waste law on the spot.

Future In Our Hands is a Norwegian NGO that works to reduce food waste, by aiming to update the law to meet the modern sustainable European standard.

In 2022 the Norwegian grocery stores were throwing away enough food to feed 1/3 of the country's population, but Future In Our Hands lacked the public support they needed to get the Norwegian Parliaments attention.

Norway is far behind other countries Europe when it comes to food waste, to the degree that food waste isn't even tracked by the food industry (looking at our neighbouring countries with a very similar culture to ours we are likely at the top of the food waste statistic in all of Europe).

Big chains aiming to save money and lazy politicians had no plans about changing this in the near future - unless the people of Norway suddenly started to care.

By opening a "grocery chain" filled with food waste, we could invite the whole nation to dumpster dive without risking 3 years in jail - since picking up expired food from a dumpster is only illegal if it's a dumpster.

The experience let people feel, see and taste the huge amount (and quality) of the food their local grocery store would throw away on a daily basis.

Placing the Dumpster Deli's outside of big grocery stores, we got a super visible placement while pulling people in to taste our trash in a hungry situation.

PRIMARY GOAL:

Get the new food waste law into parliament.

TARGET AUDIENCE:

Politicians and decision makers in the parliament.

APPROACH:

To reach politicians, we needed to make a cultural movement among the general public (not just enviromental activists).

Not an easy feat, with a general population sick and tired of hearing about food waste from depressing environmental campaigns for years. It was time to break completely with our category: and do something fun.

INSIGHT:

Norwegians still thought the "expired food" in question might have been "thrown away for a good reason". They needed to see it, feel it, or even better; experience the taste of it.

The outdated food waste law in question is mostly technical and boring, but one small paragraph stood out: In Norway you may risk up to three years in prison for dumpster diving.

The small «store» was placed outside several big food chains, with an invitation to place their expired food in our little store instead of in their own dumpsters, so that people could dumpster dive risk-free.

We started with one dumpster, and after massive amount of requests to get the Dumpster to more cities more dumpsters are now in production.

The initial Dumpster had minimum 30 placements within the first few weeks, promoted through a location finder in a pinned story on Future In Our Hands instagram account.

The first Dumpster Deli covered all the major Norwegian news channels from TV as well as Newspapers within 24 hours, generating 4M+ in earned media and reaching 23% of the total population.

But most importantly: We reached our primary goal of making The Norwegian Parliament invite Future In Our Hands to legislate their suggestion for a new food waste law. It's being negotiated in the Parliament as we're writing this (!)

- The new food waste law made it it to parliament

- 4.1M+ in earned media

- 23% of total population reached organically

If there's one subculture that knows exactly how massive and delicious Norway’s food waste problem is, it's dumpster divers.

We expanded the dumpster diving subculture into a full-fledged Norwegian culture, by making it legal, and by giving the trash just as much love as new food gets through a delicious campaign drawing people in.