Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Food waste is a big topic — it deserves discussion. I decided to draw attention to unwanted fruits and vegetables in supermarkets. Fruits and vegetables are the most common type of food waste in the industry.

Shoppers are less likely to buy fruits and vegetables that have cosmetic irregularities but are otherwise completely fine. They prefer to select the more beautiful ones.

To make these unwanted fruits and vegetables more visible to people, I simply made stickers of a similar visual style, to apply to the products. The point of this idea was to create a dialogue between the stickers and the supermarket shoppers.

Each sticker contained a visual of a cute face, along with a quote. I find that visualising emotions is a good and playful way to reach people. The shopper who spontaneously grabs a piece of fruit could then read the message and think about it. The quotes on the stickers said:

Vezmi ma domov [Take me home]
Som na z jedenie [I am dishy and delicious]
Nechcem ísť do koša [I don’t want to go into the trash]

I went to the nearest supermarket and looked for fruits and vegetables with imperfections. I stuck the stickers on these “unwanted vitamins” in the hope that shoppers would take them home.

When vegetables or fruits don’t look perfect it doesn’t mean they have less nutritional value. One of the steps to reduce food waste could be to buy these bad-looking fruits or vegetables on our next visit to the supermarket. Let’s start today and not leave them to rot.