Bees can find sugar where you least expect it
Nas Grunt
Issue 40 | September 2016
Agency
McCann Prague
Creative Team
Creative Directors Klara Palmer Lars Killi Jamie Mietz Sanjiv Mistry Art Directors Richard Axell John Gerischer
Production Team
Strategic Planner Lucie Rust Client Service Director Martina Vopršalová Account Director Lucie Srbková Creative Excellence Manager Europe Carmen Bistrian
Date
June 2016
Background
Diabetes, largely caused by excessive consumption of sugar, is one of the world's fastest-growing diseases. In the Czech Republic, where average sugar consumption is three times recommended levels, the incidence of diabetes is 10%.
National health food chain Nas Grunt wanted to draw attention to this, provoke a public debate about the issue, and drive awareness of its own range of healthier products.
Idea
One of the issues with sugar consumption is that it is often concealed in unlikely products, whether instant soup, hamburgers or salad dressing. Thus, to many consumers, it is an invisible product.
To draw attention to this, Nas Grunt recruited an apiarist and his swarm of bees.
Bees can find sugar in any product where the proportion is greater than 15% and turn it into honey.
Fed sugar-heavy foods like hamburgers, cereals, salad dressing and barbecue sauce, the bees produced the appropriate honey.
A few weeks later, Nas Grunt launched its latest honey range: Hamburger Honey, Instant Soup Honey, Salad Dressing Honey, Ketchup Honey and Cereal Honey.
Results
When the range launched in stores, backed by OOH, online, print, influencer and sampling activations, the reactions were instant, sparking a national debate about hidden sugar.
Nas Grunt's organic social media reach topped the 300,000 mark.
Website traffic increased by 30%.
In-store visits rose by 10%.
Our Thoughts
This is clever. Getting bees to do the dirty work, so to speak, by turning hamburgers and other sugar-heavy products into honey, is a neat way of making the invisible sugar visible.
It's also brave. There's always a danger people will think Nas Grunt really does sell Instant Soup honey.
But the health food chain is playing a longer game (and we don't hear that too often these days) because, before it can up its sales of healthier stuff, it has to start a re-education programme. And as we know about the debates over sugar taxes, you can't do that overnight. Bravo, Nas Grunt.