If we’re serious about tackling the sugar health crisis in America, we have to understand it will be a long fight that has to be fought every single day. Add to that the extra vulnerability from black communities and you realize that a clever, but isolated activation won’t change anything.

The Lil Sugar campaign is a full-blown integrated campaign, with an original song that plays on a music animation film, presenting a character that can be captured by an app, and is the protagonist of a book. It can also be found on school curriculum activities.

Excess sugar consumption by children is a gigantic problem in the US. It is a key driver to serious diseases, such as child obesity and diabetes, both of which are risk factors for other illnesses such as heart disease and COVID-19.

To make matters worse, added sugar is in most packaged foods, but it goes by over 150 obscure names.

The thing is, health literacy isn’t exactly kids' favorite topic, so how do we raise awareness about the issue and drive behavior change without boring them to death?

We want to expose all of sugar’s disguises and turn kids, parents, and caregivers into sugar experts, and by doing what the food industry does every day: presenting ourselves as something kids love.

People need to wise up to what the food industry has been doing for decades, but it’s easier when they don’t feel like they’re being lectured.

So, to fight big sugar, we created a Lil Sugar: an evil sugar cube who is a master of disguise. Each disguise represents one of the obscure names that the food industry uses to hide sugar inside packaged foods.

The Lil Sugar campaign fuses hip hop, gaming and storytelling to expose all of sugar’s secret disguises, so now kids can not only spot sugar hiding in food, but also catch it red-handed.

We needed to hit two different timelines: the first addresses this crisis with the urgency it demands, and the second plays the long game by generating long-term impact.

In order to accomplish the first goal, we needed to raise awareness about hidden sugars in packaged foods everywhere; for the second, we needed to drive behavior change.

The main target was of course, children, but we also needed to reach their parents and caregivers, many of whom are the primary food shoppers in the household.

The approach was to rebrand health education as things each audience embraces naturally, like music, gaming, and storytelling. That way, teaching where sugar is hiding in foods or even scientific terms like glycemic indexes won’t be an uphill battle anymore.

Since October 2021 we have been running a fully integrated campaign composed of many moving parts.

The music video is the main driver of a larger campaign; it’s an animation that fuses cute with menacing, and shows Lil Sugar, “MTV Cribs” style, bragging about its master plan of disguising itself to sneak inside people’s food, harming their health. Darryl DMC MacDaniels from RunDMC co-wrote and performed as Lil Sugar, giving life to the character with lots of swagger and glee. It was aired via targeted donated pre-roll media, movie theater screening and taxi cabs, but it was also featured at community events, directly reaching students and educators.

3.000 copies of The Lil Sugar storybook were printed thanks to an educational grant and were distributed through community events and school curricula.

Both drive people to the Lil Sugar app, which gamifies dense health information, helping modify behaviors in their daily lives.

The campaign already shows strong growth across the US, thanks to partnerships with community events, who so far reported 39,423 downloads specific to community events including Lil Sugar. 5,852 schools registered, and reported participation of 3,089,107 students.

The most recent event is the Lil Sugar Nutrition Education Activity Contest, endorsed by the NYC Board of Education and which delivered health education activities for over 17,000 students.

The Lil Sugar campaign is becoming a grassroots movement with the power to turn everyone into a nutrition literacy advocate.

Educators are embracing the character more and more through online activity contests, with thousands of schools using Lil Sugar in their curriculums.

The campaign is steadily laying its foundations in key communities across the US, gradually becoming an effective, cost-free tool to teach health literacy.