The French supermarket Intermarché introduced lumpy and misshapen fruit and vegetables to combat food waste, giving their own aisle and selling them at a 30% discount.
“Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” is the campaign launched in 2014 with the support of advertising agency Marcel, to prove that unattractive produce is just as edible. It celebrates the ‘ugly’ food items that are usually thrown away by growers and considered unfit for consumption, often pushed by the strict standards dictated by the big distribution.
Intermarché wanted to help prevent food waste by proving to customers that imperfect fruits and vegetables are just as delicious as their pristine counterparts.
Determined to show they are simply flavoursome, the supermarket offered also soups and juices made with the disfigured fruit and veg for customers to try.
The campaign by Intermarché, the third largest supermarket chain in France, was an attempt to re-educate people’s perspectives on ugly fruit and vegetables and the result was a huge success!
Here the seven posters produced starring the unattractive produce, which ran during the EU’s Year Against Food Waste (where the waste sits for 100 million tonnes a year) in 2014:
