How Open Now Launched Nutri-Score Across the Netherlands

Correcting Consumer Confusion Around Nutri-Score in the Netherlands

Nutri-Score became the official Dutch front-of-pack food-choice logo on 1 January 2024, per rijksoverheid.nl, following a pilot period that began in 2019. The 2024 'Look, compare & choose' campaign entered a market already familiar with the label in name, but not always in practice. According to research cited in the 2024 activity report on transnational governance of Nutri-Score, eighty percent of consumers in the Netherlands were familiar with Nutri-Score and knew how to use it, and fifty-nine percent considered it a useful label. Those figures, while encouraging, contain a strategic complication: familiarity does not equal correct usage, and a significant portion of the population remained at risk of misapplying the logo across product categories.

Open Now's strategic response was to narrow the campaign's job to one corrective insight: Nutri-Score is a within-category comparison tool, not a universal nutritional ranking across all foods. This distinction matters commercially as well as nutritionally. In the Netherlands, Dutch food-retail turnover was estimated at approximately 49.5 billion euros in 2024, according to Retaildetail Eu, and the grocery sector is heavily concentrated. Albert Heijn and Jumbo together represented approximately fifty-eight percent of Dutch grocery retail, per retaildetail.eu, meaning that any meaningful shift in consumer shelf behaviour at those two chains alone would carry outsized public health significance. The five largest supermarket groups — Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Plus and Coop, Aldi, and Lidl — accounted for more than seventy-five percent of supermarket floor space, according to retaildetail.eu, giving the campaign a well-defined retail environment in which behaviour change would either succeed or stall. The mantra 'Look, compare & choose' was engineered as a mnemonic that survives the compressed cognitive window of in-store decision-making.

Colourful Lighting and Social Modelling Power the 'Look, Compare & Choose' Creative

Director Nils Vleugels led the film execution for 'Look, compare & choose', with creative work credited to Lukas Van de Ven, Mart Verschuren, and Huib Scholten at Open Now, and production handled by DPPLR. The creative team identified an inherent visual asset in the brief: the Nutri-Score label itself. Its alphabetic grading system — running from A to E — is colour-coded from deep green through yellow to red, a spectrum that is immediately legible and emotionally intuitive.

Rather than treating the label as a supporting graphic element, the campaign places its colour logic at the centre of the visual language. Colourful lighting is deployed across the film execution so that the transition from shelf to screen to label feels continuous — the act of picking up a product and glancing at the Nutri-Score becomes a single, fluid moment rather than an additional cognitive step. This is a sound craft decision: it closes the gap between the instructional message and the purchase behaviour the campaign is trying to shape.

Social modelling provides the campaign's behavioural backbone. Characters within the spots demonstrate the three-step mantra in realistic grocery environments, normalising the behaviour by showing it being performed rather than merely described. This technique draws on well-established principles of observational learning, and its application here is deliberate — the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport and DPC required an execution that would be both comprehensible and motivating across a diverse Dutch audience. The combination of a colour-driven visual system, a director with experience in performance-led commercial work, and a team at Open Now capable of translating a government communication mandate into accessible storytelling gives the campaign its functional strength in the Netherlands market.

Nutri-Score Campaign Results and What the Evidence Reveals

The 2024 'Look, compare & choose' campaign for the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport was described as successful in the 2024 activity report on transnational governance of Nutri-Score, a finding that situates the Netherlands effort within the broader European project of standardising front-of-pack nutritional labelling. The campaign was launched on 2 April 2024, as confirmed by open.overheid.nl, and reached consumers across television, online video, digital out-of-home, newspapers, and magazines.

Consumer data provides supporting context. According to research reported in the Nutri-Score transnational governance activity report, eighty percent of Dutch consumers were familiar with Nutri-Score and knew how to use it, and fifty-nine percent considered it a useful label at the time of the campaign. These figures indicate a foundation of receptivity that the campaign's media distribution was positioned to convert into correct, habitual use. No verified performance data — such as post-campaign uplift in correct label usage, media reach figures, or recall scores — is publicly available for 'Look, compare & choose' at the time of writing.

Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on three durable assets: the precision of its single corrective insight, the mnemonic efficiency of its three-step mantra, and its multi-channel saturation in a concentrated grocery market. In an environment where Albert Heijn and Jumbo alone account for a majority of Dutch grocery retail, according to retaildetail.eu, a well-distributed public-information campaign operates with compounding reach. No verified awards for 'Look, compare & choose' appear in the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC databases.