COMPANY BACKGROUND

Chobani is an American yogurt manufacturer. Its purpose is “Better food for more people.” We believe this extended to include the people who cannot pay for it.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Chobani wanted to expand its corporate citizenship efforts to make an impact of scale. Our challenge was to identify the opportunity and how to act on it.

We identified an opportunity in “lunch shaming”—when a school publicly stigmatizes students and their parents to pay off an accrued lunch debt. More than 75% of school districts carry school lunch debt. More than 40% of schools say their debt is growing.

OBJECTIVES:

1) Achieve 100M impressions of Chobani’s anti-lunch shaming campaign

2) 100%+ in total online mentions of the issue

3) Get two politicians to support the campaign

One in six children live in homes that don’t have consistent access to food. This is most visible in our schools. The American Federation of Teachers ranks nutrition and hunger among its top three priorities because poor nutrition leads to poor student performance.

“Lunch shaming” plagues more than 75% of American schools. 40% say their debt is growing.

Tension is growing, as is the severity of schools’ recoupment tactics:??

• Denying food to debt-carrying students

• Barring indebted students from prom

• Denying them their diploma

• Branding children with “too poor to pay” stamps

• Threatening to take children away from their parents and place them in foster care

In the vast majority of cases, students from low-income families are the targets of lunch shaming policies. In fact, an alternative name for “lunch shaming” is “poor shaming.”

Our creative idea was #FillUpTheirPlate—a national grassroots effort to raise awareness of and federal solutions for lunch shaming.

STRATEGY

We kicked it off by paying off one school district’s large lunch debt, challenging others to pay off school debt in their communities, and following up with $500,000 investment towards lobbying politicians to pass a national anti-lunch shaming legislation.

PRIMARY AUDIENCE

Who: All Americans

?Why: To achieve anything at scale, we’d want a broad cross section of Americans to support it.

SECONDARY AUDIENCES

Who: National media

?Why: We’d need media support to create a national narrative for—and sustain momentum on—an issue of choice.

TERTIARY AUDIENCES

Who: State and national politicians

?Why: We’d needed them to propose and support the legislative solution.

BEGIN WITH ACTION

In May 2019, the Warwick, Rhode Island, school district announced plans to “lunch shame” its debt-carrying students. The total debt: $50k. Within six hours of the Warwick story breaking, Chobani had paid down the debt. ??

LET PEOPLE—NOT THE BRAND—CARRY THE STORY

- We opted to keep the news candid. Chobani’s founder and CEO announced the company’s action in an iPhone-recorded message posted to his Twitter account (56k followers) with the hashtag #FillUpTheirPlates. ?

?- Needing to move faster than paid media permitted, we depended upon Chobani Twitter (107k followers).

SUSTAIN THE STORY

#FillUpTheirPlates extended to Instagram where we educated the Chobani fans about lunch shaming. In parallel, Chobani continued to lead by example. It paid down more meal debts in more school districts. This garnered another round of significant media attention and helped sustain coverage of the issue.

OBJECTIVE: Achieve 100M impressions for the campaign

RESULTS

• 3B media impressions from 1,117 unique individual stories

• Announcement Tweet earned 1M total video views across platforms, reaching 518M people, and garnering 82k mentions

• 80K+ positive social mentions for Chobani

• 412K social earned engagements for Chobani

• Led to 1.54MM incremental lbs of yogurt

• Coincided Chobani’s highest share ever: 20.2

OBJECTIVE: 100%+ in total online mentions of the issue

RESULTS:

• +293% total mentions (from 7k to 28k mentions)

• +944% reach (from 45MM people to over 470 million people)

OBJECTIVE: Earn support from 2 politicians

RESULTS:

• Four U.S. presidential candidates made lunch shaming a component of their platform

• Rep. Robert Lancia (R-RI) proposed legislative solution

• Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) proposed legislative solution

• Senator Udall (R-NM) proposed legislative solution

• CA Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislative solution