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SuperMax Reusables Turns Expiry Dates Into Environmental Action
SuperMax Reusables is an augmented reality social filter created by de la Cruz Ogilvy for Puerto Rican supermarket retailer SuperMax in 2023, designed to transform food product packaging after its expiry date into a reusable environmental resource by replacing the concept of "use by" with "use for."
The campaign launches from a documented reality: approximately one-third of food purchased at the supermarket is discarded when it reaches its use-by date, according to the campaign's own brief as cited by de la Cruz Ogilvy. In Puerto Rico, where food imports account for a significant share of household consumption and packaging waste compounds environmental pressure, the problem carries particular weight. The Reusables program responds not by reducing what consumers buy, but by extending the useful life of what they already own — the packaging itself.
Developed over the course of a year, the technology uses augmented reality and computer vision, powered by image recognition, a convolutional neural network, and a machine learning training process, to identify SuperMax product labels through a Meta Spark social filter. Once a product is identified, the filter replaces its expiry information with instructions for an alternative environmental use — a second life for containers, bottles, and packaging that would otherwise enter the waste stream. The experience is available as an open-source tool at reusables.ai, free to access globally.
The campaign sits within the electronics and technology advertising category, reflecting the degree of technical engineering required to bring it to life. It represents the first documented instance in Puerto Rico of an Instagram filter being deployed specifically to educate consumers about food waste and packaging reuse. The Clapboard Score for Reusables is 72 out of 100, reflecting strong creative engineering and clear social purpose offset by limited independently verified performance data in the public domain.
De la Cruz Ogilvy identifies food waste not as a consumer behaviour problem but as an information gap. The strategic premise is that most people discard packaging at expiry not out of indifference, but because they lack knowledge of alternative uses — a reframe that positions SuperMax as a source of environmental intelligence rather than simply a retailer of consumable goods.
In Puerto Rico, the context sharpens this argument. The island's geography and import-dependent food system mean that packaging waste has a compounded environmental footprint: goods travel further, and the infrastructure for large-scale recycling and reuse remains constrained compared to mainland United States markets. The campaign does not cite island-specific waste figures, but the structural conditions of Puerto Rico's supply chain give the Reusables premise credible local grounding.
The augmented reality grocery sector has attracted growing commercial investment globally. According to Grand View Research, the broader augmented reality market continues to expand, with retail and consumer packaged goods among the fastest-adopting verticals. Competitors in the sustainability-marketing space — including Walmart in the United States and Carrefour across Latin American markets — have invested in digital tools to communicate environmental commitments, but neither has deployed an open-source, label-scanning AR filter of this technical specificity at the product level. That distinction gives SuperMax and de la Cruz Ogilvy a defensible first-mover position within the Puerto Rican grocery sector.
The decision to build on Meta Spark and distribute through Instagram reflects strategic pragmatism. Instagram penetration in Puerto Rico is high relative to island population, and Meta Spark gives the filter immediate reach without requiring a standalone app download. Making the tool open source at reusables.ai extends the campaign's footprint beyond SuperMax's own customer base, transforming a retail activation into a publicly available environmental utility.
Rafael Reina, Chief Creative Officer at de la Cruz Ogilvy and leader of the Reusables project, describes the creative and technical challenge in precise terms: the team needed to train a machine to read the visual language of a supermarket shelf and respond with an entirely new message. The result required a year of development before public release.
At its core, the execution relies on a convolutional neural network — the same class of deep learning architecture used in facial recognition and medical imaging — trained specifically to identify SuperMax product labels. When a user opens the Meta Spark filter on Instagram and points their camera at a qualifying product, the system runs image recognition against its trained model, identifies the label, and overlays a new visual layer: not the expiry date, but instructions for how to reuse the packaging for an environmental purpose. The phrase "use by" is effectively overwritten by "use for," a creative decision that is both linguistically precise and immediately legible.
The machine learning training process required the team to build and iterate a dataset of SuperMax product labels — a form of creative production that sits closer to software engineering than traditional advertising craft, yet serves a communicative function that is entirely advertising in nature. The filter was then published simultaneously on Meta Spark platforms and as an open-source resource at reusables.ai, ensuring accessibility regardless of platform preference.
Carlos Thompson, President of de la Cruz Ogilvy, and Jorge Hernández, President of SuperMax, are credited as principals behind the programme alongside Reina. The campaign marks a natural evolution from de la Cruz Ogilvy's earlier SuperMax work: "The Eye Tracker," launched in the 2020–2022 period and recognised with a Gold Lion in Mobile Technology and mCommerce at the 2022 Cannes Lions, according to records documented by ogilvy.com, established the agency-client partnership as a space for technology-led creative solutions in the Puerto Rican market.
No independently verified consumer performance data for the Reusables campaign — including filter activations, reach figures, or documented reduction in packaging waste — is publicly available at the time of writing. What the public record does confirm is a pattern of industry recognition that speaks to the campaign's structural credibility among professional juries.
Reusables was identified as a Finalist at the Effie Awards Latin America 2023 for the entry titled "Reusables: extendiendo las fechas de expiración," attributed to de la Cruz Ogilvy for SuperMax in Puerto Rico, according to latameffie.com. A separate project page reported by agencycompile.com and delacruz.com indicates a Bronze award in the Small Budget category at the same awards cycle, though this conflicts with the official Effie finalist listing and the discrepancy is unresolved in the public record.
At the FIAP Awards 2023, the campaign received three Bronze recognitions: Best Sustainability Campaign, Mobile Innovation, and Best Program Launch Strategy, as reported by agencycompile.com. These three awards across a single sustainability-focused technology campaign represent a consistent jury response to the idea's originality and executional rigour.
An archive listing documented by clapboard.com recorded the campaign page generating 4,843 views and 27 likes, with no public commentary. No coverage of Reusables was identified in major English-language advertising trade publications including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious at the time of this analysis. The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on a genuinely rare combination: an open-source AR tool, a machine learning backbone, and a reframe of consumer information that requires no behaviour change beyond pointing a camera — a low-friction model for environmental education that the award juries appear to have rewarded accordingly.
SuperMax Reusables is an augmented reality filter created by de la Cruz Ogilvy in Puerto Rico in 2023. It uses image recognition and machine learning to identify product labels and replace expiry information with instructions for reusing the packaging, turning "use by" dates into "use for" the environment.
De la Cruz Ogilvy created Reusables for SuperMax. Rafael Reina, Chief Creative Officer, led the project. The technology combines augmented reality, computer vision, image recognition, a convolutional neural network, and machine learning, deployed as a Meta Spark filter and published open source at reusables.ai after a year of development.
Reusables was named a Finalist at Effie Awards Latin America 2023, according to latameffie.com. At FIAP Awards 2023, the campaign received three Bronze awards: Best Sustainability Campaign, Mobile Innovation, and Best Program Launch Strategy, as reported by agencycompile.com.
The filter targets the knowledge gap behind food waste. When users scan a SuperMax product nearing its expiry date, the AR overlay replaces disposal messaging with alternative reuse instructions for the packaging, directly addressing environmental pollution in Puerto Rico by extending the useful life of materials already in consumers' hands.
Reusables is publicly available as an open-source tool at reusables.ai, free for anyone to use globally. It also runs on Meta Spark platforms through Instagram. Rafael Reina confirmed the team built it to be easily accessible on all Meta Spark platforms from launch in April 2023.
The Eye Tracker, a previous de la Cruz Ogilvy campaign for SuperMax, won a Gold Lion in Mobile Technology and mCommerce at Cannes Lions 2022, according to ogilvy.com. Reusables continues that technology-led creative direction, again using mobile platforms to solve a real consumer problem in the Puerto Rican market.
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