The Campaign

Disposable chopsticks endanger our health (whitened with chemicals), forests and the wildlife around (deforestation); and for what? A single use of 25 minutes in average, before being thrown away. We even have reached a point where, at work or in our homes, we have a locker full of unpacked disposable chopsticks; that’s insane. So why are we still consuming them? Obviously because there weren’t any real alternatives to disposable chopsticks. Well we do have now, and it’s called Edible Chopsticks: Chopsticks you can actually eat. Edible chopsticks are made in three different flavours: Original Wheat, Matcha, and Purple Sweet Potato. Here there is no coating, it is made of wheat flour blended with icing sugar, milk powder, butter and water without any preservatives.

Creative Execution

We partnered with a food factory in the province of Anhui, Shui Fu You Qing, to create and develop our Edible Chopsticks. Certified by China’s food safety authorities, made and packaged by local communities, the project provides hundreds of jobs along the way. Our packaging is made from 100%-recycled paper, it’s completely sustainable. We wanted our design to be as appealing as a candy bar; bright, colorful, and mouth-watering. Eleme already partnered with 43 major restaurants chains* in the country, spreading our Edible chopsticks. Within a week, 250 000 pairs have been spread out. And it’s only the beginning, since Eleme will progressively announce new restaurants’ partnerships in the coming weeks.

Results

Eleme’s long term objective is to eventually reach a 100% sustainable business model. Edible Chopsticks aims to solve the country’s deforestation due to the enormous demand of disposable chopsticks. Wooden or plastic disposable chopsticks are very cheap, true; but we can make Edible Chopsticks as cheap, with the volumes; once we get the volumes, there would be no more reason to destroy forests for chopsticks. For now, that’s 43 major restaurant chains that are distributing our chopsticks; Within the first week of launch, we already spread out 250,000 pairs. We aim for a 100 more chains, and a total of 10 million edible chopsticks produced by the end of this year. Certified by China’s food safety authorities, made and packaged by local communities (in the province of Anhui), the project provides hundreds of jobs along the way.

Edible Chopsticks is a direct and sustainable alternative to disposable chopsticks. We made them, it’s already a reality, and it aims to replace disposable chopsticks, by changing customers’ behavior at its core. Its success lies in the hands of all of us: the restaurants, the consumers, and of course Eleme. Eleme and the restaurants need to broaden the distribution of Edible Chopsticks, consumers need to switch from disposable to edible chopsticks. Edible Chopsticks is also an innovative and powerful awareness tool, as we noted a 60% drop of disposable chopsticks’ orders on Eleme app since the beginning of the program.

China's food delivery market registered an extremely fast growth last year as Chinese, especially the White Collars, are increasingly choosing to order food online. The online food delivery market hits 204.6 billion yuan ($31.9 billion) in 2017, 23 percent more than the previous year, according to Jiang Junxian, director of the China Cuisine Association (CCA). As 295 million users have already used online services to order food, this booming business is also fuelling concerns about everything from road safety, waste to the impact on the environment. Disposable chopsticks are one of them; they endanger our health (whitened with chemicals), forests and the wildlife around (deforestation). Instead of just exposing the problem, our approach has been to create and spread a sustainable alternative to it, a real solution.