Foodbank is Australia’s largest food relief organisation, playing a lead role in fighting hunger, and helping millions of Australians who are facing the perils of food insecurity.

The charities brand values are aligned with The UN's Goal 2: Zero Hunger - striving towards ending hunger and ensuring Australian children and their families have access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.

Foodbank also play a vital role in tackling Australia’s $20 billion food waste problem and helping the environment. Their food and grocery rescue operations last year saved 81 million kilograms of CO2 emissions.

As a not-for-profit organisation, they rely heavily on Government funding to sustain their food programs. So when the Federal Government cut their funding in half - cutting $323,000 from their annual budgets, they were facing a crisis.

The brief was to raise money and awareness to support Foodbank in delivering emergency food relief and breakfast programs to hungry children across Western Australia after the Government cut funding to the charity by $323,000 per annum just a month before Christmas.

Despite Australia being a seemingly wealthy nation, the issue of food insecurity continues to grow. In 2018, more than 1 in 5 children in the nation’s largest state of Western Australia experienced the plight of hunger.

When Foodbank's government funding was slashed, it was at a time of year when an abundance of other worthy organisations were also competing for donations in the lead up to Christmas. The total amount donated and claimed by individual taxpayers in Australia was down 7.2% in 2018. This reduction in giving is compounded by the proliferation of charities with 9,044 New charities established in the last three years. In short, people are donating less money, to more charities.

In the lead-up to Christmas, business as usual was not going to cut it. Foodbank needed an Appeal unlike any they had done before. An appeal that would cut through the clutter of charities competing for donations in the traditional advertising and marketing space.

We created a new cereal brand, called Hungry Puffs – The breakfast over 100,000 West Aussie kids wake up to every day – nothing.

In the lead-up to Christmas, entirely empty boxes of Hungry Puffs were stocked in over 40 major supermarket cereal aisles across Western Australia.

Grocery shoppers who were in the process of buying food for their own families were suddenly encouraged to support a much bigger cause – and help feed children who go without breakfast every day.

To turn a box of nothing into something, shoppers simply had to purchase Hungry Puffs at check-out along with their weekly groceries. Every $5 box provided 10 children with their next meal.

Previously, Foodbank’s donation appeals involved a traditional advertising campaign pleading for help, with the hope the public will make donations at a later point.

This year our strategy was to craft an idea with a more immediate response and create a ‘moment of truth’ - we wanted to get the attention of grocery shoppers while in the process of buying food for their own families in supermarkets across the state.

Shoppers were confronted with an easy opportunity to support a much bigger cause – and help feed children who go without breakfast every day. All they needed to do was add an empty box of Hungry Puffs to their trolley along with their other groceries.

Despite being an empty box, we treated Hungry Puffs as you would any new retail product and looked for ways to stand out in a busy supermarket environment in the lead up to Christmas.

We studied other cereal brands packaging and design techniques, deciding to use a series of popular cereal brand tropes, but with a stark, black and white design, and a few dark twists – like the creation of a ‘sad child’ character and an empty bowl.

Convincing over 40 major supermarkets across Western Australia to give up valuable shelf space was key to ensuring the campaign was big enough to make a real difference.

The campaign was further supported by an online store, in-store sampling stands (bowls of nothing), a low budget TV, print and radio, and a social media campaign that gathered support from celebrities, politicians, influencers and food bloggers throughout Australia and across the world.

In 4 weeks, the Hungry Puffs campaign resulted in the creation of 625,770 meals for Western Australian children and raised $312,885.

62,577 boxes of Hungry Puffs were sold.

Donations to Foodbank also more than doubled during the campaign period. Receiving 2.4 times more donations on the previous year (2017 to 2018).

Hungry Puffs produced a 1973% return on investment for Foodbank - on a total campaign budget of $15,000 AUD.

The positive attention and publicity gained from Hungry Puffs helped overturn a proposed government funding cut. Instead the government agreed to double their funding over the next four years.

Foodbank has just reached an agreement with a major supermarket chain which will see Hungry Puffs stocked in a further 208 stores across the state by the end of 2019.