CASE STUDY

Ella’s Kitchen

Campaigning to update and enhance NHS advice around vegetable-led weaning

Client

Ella's Kitchen

Sector

The Situation

Ella’s Kitchen is the UK’s largest baby food manufacturer, with a turnover of over £100m per year and a determination to be a force for good in society. With this in mind, Ella’s Kitchen approached us to develop a campaign that inspired parents to try vegetable weaning to encourage lifelong healthy eating habits for their children.

The Veg For Victory campaign aimed to enhance the NHS Choices (Now Start 4 Life) guidance on weaning to give a more significant role for vegetables, as this was an important target for parents and healthcare professionals.

What we did

Demonstrating a strong evidence base and the brand’s credibility, we worked closely with Ella’s Kitchen and the British Nutrition Foundation to design and execute a roundtable event to provide a forum for a productive, interdisciplinary discussion with industry experts, on the topic of weaning with vegetables first.

A peer-reviewed consensus report was produced as a result of the roundtable, highlighting the benefits of vegetable led weaning and demonstrating interdisciplinary expert support for this approach. This was then distilled into an accessible ‘Greener Paper’ for wider audiences, thus expanding the reach of the campaign’s messaging.

Utilising the key messages from the ‘Greener Paper’ we then launched a wide-scale programme of political engagement, including a media launch day in Westminster, with MPs from across the House of Commons attending. The launch day generated national news coverage.

The Result

This campaign saw us securing meetings for Ella’s Kitchen with almost 30 MPs, many of whom publicly supported the campaign on Twitter and through their engagement with Public Health England.

The ‘Greener Paper’ was downloaded over 5,000 times, making it the second most downloaded paper of 2016 in the academic journal, Nutrition Bulletin.

Notably, the campaign gained the support of Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution, as he declared his support to his 11 million followers on Instagram and Twitter.

The campaign was also successful at a grassroots level, with over 2,000 Tweets from parents sharing their children’s experiences with vegetable weaning, using the campaign hashtag #vegforvictory.

Most importantly, the Veg For Victory campaign resulted in the NHS updating its Start 4 Life guidance, which now recommends a vegetable first weaning diet for babies.

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