Background & Context

Felix, the Heinz of Sweden, is a well-known brand in Sweden, with over 95% unaided brand recall. They have recently embarked on a journey towards building the brand entirely around sustainability, committing themselves to, for example, adding vegetarian alternatives to family classics such as meatballs.

Creative challenge

Felix is known as a safe, traditional family brand, and although many of their products, like frozen ready-meals, are in fact already very climate friendly today (cooking large batches of food and freezing them is actually more energy efficient than if every consumer were to cook their own meal from scratch), they are not perceived as such by consumers. This means that, especially within Felix’s important target group of parents (30-40 years) with young children, the brand was losing its appeal.

Our research told us Felix’s demographic really wanted to shop for climate-friendly food brands but found the sustainability information too confusing and – perhaps as a result – believed sustainable grocery shopping to be too expensive.

Solution

Our inspiration was to link these two issues – clear information and cost. ‘The Climate Store’ would be the world’s first grocery store where the ‘price’ of each item would be its carbon footprint. Customers could shop at this pop-up and compare a range of products priced in ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ (CO2e) currency, ‘paying’ at the till using special CO2e banknotes. To truly consider the impact of their choices, everyone would have a limit of 18.9 kg CO2e – the maximum personal weekly allowance if we are to meet the 2030 Paris Agreement goals. They would leave with their groceries and a receipt item using the CO2e of each purchase to reflect upon later.

Execution

For over four months, our integrated team managed everything – from location scouting to the design of branded materials, from dressing the shop to actually running it for two days.

The stock was a vital focus – ensuring enough variety for it to be a ‘real’ shopping experience, including a balance of climate-friendly vs. non-climate-friendly to give our shoppers dilemmas.

As the October launch approached, one further hurdle emerged: Our shop would open during a COVID-19 surge. Pandemic protocols meant that advance promotion, media invitations, and educational visits had to be downscaled. It limited us to 44 visitors per day, but we turned this into something positive, supporting every customer with their own personal shopper – from our and Felix’s teams – to discuss climate-conscious shopping.

We had queues of people waiting outside and even saw repeat visits – parents so impressed by the concept’s educative value that they returned with their children.