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.

The Brief

Overall budget : RMB 1,822,270 (USD 284179.09) Production for chopsticks : RMB 1,786,250 Production for video : RMB 36,020

Creative Execution

‘Edible Chopsticks’ is a sustainable innovation which aims to end massive deforestation by replacing disposable chopsticks with chopsticks you can actually eat. Edible chopsticks are made in three different flavors: 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. Our product also has a long shelf life of more than 10 months. And if you don’t want to eat it, you can just throw it away; it decomposes within a week. Our packaging is made from 100%-recycled paper, it’s completely sustainable. Saving the world has never tasted this good. We wanted our design to be as appealing as a candy bar; bright, colorful, almost mouth-watering.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Within the first week of launch, we already distributed a total of 250 000 pairs of edible chopsticks, nationwide with the help of 43 major restaurant chains, and our fleet of delivery men. By the end of the year, we aim to partner with a hundred restaurant chains, to spread out around 10 million of edible chopsticks. Restaurant partners registered in average an increase of 30% more orders than the usual; mostly driven by consumers’ desire to try this new product. We also noticed a change of behavior since the beginning of the program, as we noted a drop of 60% in disposable chopsticks’ orders on the app; Edible chopsticks is more than a sustainable alternative, it’s also an extremely powerful awareness tool.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Every year, 80 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks are produced in China, which are only used once, for an average lifetime span of 25 minutes and then discarded. Eleme, China’s leading food delivery platform (holding more than 55% of market share), processes alone around 15 million orders a day. That’s a lot of chopsticks that are going straight into the trash, or left in a corner, unused and forgotten. As part of their Relab program (‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ actions), Eleme introduced Edible Chopsticks, chopsticks you can actually eat. It’s as solid and precise than normal chopsticks; but it’s completely sustainable.

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.