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How The Waste Factory Turned Food Scraps Into Supermarket Shelves
The Waste Factory's 2016 Designed by Waste campaign uses vegetable-derived ink, made from discarded food remnants, to print the product packaging of its upcycled soups, marking the brand's entry into Dutch supermarkets with a creative execution that extends the waste-reduction mission to every surface of the product itself.
The campaign launched in October 2016 in the Netherlands, created by Eindhoven-based advertising agency Fama Volat. The brief was precise: after a period of considerable public attention around The Waste Factory's food-waste concept, interest had begun to settle, and the brand needed to recapture that momentum ahead of its supermarket introduction. Rather than simply announce the launch, Fama Volat chose to demonstrate the brand's philosophy through the packaging itself, treating the act of printing as one final opportunity to put wasted food to use.
The Waste Factory's core model revolves around collecting the edible remains of vegetables that would otherwise be discarded — tomato ends, beetroot tops, spinach stems, and pumpkin portions — and processing them into vegetarian soups. For the Designed by Waste campaign, Fama Volat extracted pigment from these same vegetable offcuts to formulate what the agency termed veggie ink, which was then used to print the product packaging across The Waste Factory's range. The result is a material narrative in which the soup inside the package and the ink printed on its label share a common origin: food that supermarkets and suppliers considered waste.
In the Netherlands, where food waste had become a structurally significant policy concern by 2016, the campaign positioned The Waste Factory not merely as a food brand but as a proof-of-concept for circular thinking applied to the food industry. The campaign was a digital medium execution containing a single media asset, submitted in October 2016.
The Waste Factory addresses a measurable structural problem in the Dutch food industry. The Netherlands generated an estimated 1.91 to 2.64 million tonnes of food waste in 2014, according to data cited by the European Commission's food waste monitoring framework via Food Ec Europa Eu. Dutch households alone discarded approximately 40 kilograms of food per person per year in 2016, according to Voedingscentrum, the Netherlands Nutrition Centre. The Dutch government had established a formal target of reducing food waste by 20 percent relative to 2009 levels, as reported by Voedingscentrum and supported by European-level policy documentation.
Against this backdrop, The Waste Factory had already generated significant public attention before the Designed by Waste campaign launched. The brand became operational in early 2016, according to research published via Subsites Wur Nl, with its founding concept rooted in the Food2Food project — a research initiative conducted between 2012 and 2015 in partnership with Wageningen Food and Biobased Research and Dutch supermarket chain PLUS, as documented by subsites.wur.nl. That lineage gave The Waste Factory institutional credibility in the food-waste conversation, but credibility alone does not sustain retail shelf space.
In the Netherlands soup category, Unox held a 41.5 percent value share in 2017, according to GlobalData, making it the dominant incumbent. Honig and Knorr were also identified as leading Dutch soup brands by GlobalData, though specific 2016 market share figures were not disclosed. The Waste Factory was not competing on category convention — it was competing on purpose, targeting consumers in the Netherlands whose purchasing decisions were increasingly shaped by sustainability values rather than brand heritage. Fama Volat's strategic instinct, credited to strategist Thomas Creemers, was to extend the upcycling argument from the product itself to every element of its physical presentation, ensuring that the packaging told the same story as the soup inside it.
Fama Volat built the creative execution around a single discipline: consistency of concept. The vegetarian soups made by The Waste Factory already embodied upcycling by definition. The creative challenge, taken on by Levi Sars and Jeroen Manders, was to extend that logic to the packaging without it feeling like a marketing overlay. The answer was material: use the same wasted vegetable offcuts that go into the soup to produce the ink that prints the label.
The process of creating veggie ink from food waste is not a standard production technique in the food industry. Fama Volat developed a vegetable-derived pigment from the tomato ends, beetroot tops, spinach stems, and pumpkin scraps that The Waste Factory collected from suppliers and supermarkets, then applied that ink to the product packaging across the range. The creative decision transforms the packaging from a communication vessel into a functional extension of the brand's waste-reduction model — the label is itself a product of the waste stream it describes.
Visually, the execution carries the marks of its unconventional materials. Vegetable-based inks produce tones and textures that differ from synthetic alternatives, lending the packaging an organic quality that is legible as intentional rather than accidental. For a vegetarian soup brand in the Netherlands operating at the intersection of the food industry and environmental purpose, that material authenticity reinforces the message more directly than copy or colour palette alone could achieve.
The campaign was delivered as a digital medium execution with a single media asset, suggesting the creative output was concentrated and precise rather than diffuse across multiple formats. The creative team's approach — using the problem as the medium — reflects a strand of thinking that the Dutch advertising and design community has long favoured: solutions that make their logic visible through their form.
No verified performance data for the Designed by Waste campaign is publicly available. No sales uplift figures, media reach metrics, or consumer recall statistics have been published by The Waste Factory, Fama Volat, or any independently audited source. What can be assessed is the structural logic of the execution and the conditions under which it operated in the Netherlands food and drink market in 2016.
The campaign's effectiveness case rests on three reinforcing layers. First, it solved a real re-engagement problem: public interest in The Waste Factory's model had subsided following initial coverage, and the supermarket launch required renewed attention in a competitive food industry environment dominated by established players including Unox, Honig, and Knorr. Second, the creative execution created a genuinely differentiated physical artefact — packaging printed in veggie ink made from wasted vegetables — that gave journalists, buyers, and consumers a tangible story to repeat. Third, the campaign's digital medium format and single-asset concentration suggest it was designed for efficiency, reaching a specific audience rather than pursuing broad reach.
The concept also had structural longevity. The Waste Factory's origins in Wageningen Food and Biobased Research, as documented by subsites.wur.nl, gave the veggie ink innovation academic and institutional credibility that advertising claims alone cannot manufacture. That foundation matters in the Dutch food industry, where sustainability claims are subject to close public and regulatory scrutiny.
Clapboard rates Designed by Waste 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong conceptual integrity and a clear strategic rationale, offset by the campaign's limited executional scale and the absence of documented results.
Designed by Waste is a 2016 Dutch advertising campaign created by Fama Volat for The Waste Factory. It introduced the brand's upcycled vegetarian soups to supermarkets in the Netherlands by printing product packaging with veggie ink made from the same wasted vegetable offcuts used to produce the soups.
Veggie ink is a vegetable-derived pigment developed by Fama Volat from discarded food remnants including tomato ends, beetroot tops, spinach stems, and pumpkin scraps. The agency used it to print The Waste Factory's product packaging in the Netherlands, extending the brand's upcycling philosophy to every physical element of the product.
Fama Volat, an advertising agency based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, created Designed by Waste. The creative team comprised Levi Sars and Jeroen Manders, with Thomas Creemers leading strategy. The campaign launched in October 2016 to support The Waste Factory's supermarket entry.
Public attention around The Waste Factory's food-waste reduction model had subsided following an earlier wave of coverage. The brand needed to re-engage consumers in the Netherlands and generate fresh momentum specifically around its soups entering supermarket retail, where it faced established competitors including Unox and Knorr.
Dutch households discarded approximately 40 kilograms of food per person per year in 2016, according to Voedingscentrum. The Netherlands generated between 1.91 and 2.64 million tonnes of food waste in 2014, according to food.ec.europa.eu. The Waste Factory collects edible vegetable offcuts and converts them into vegetarian soups and sauces.
Designed by Waste receives a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual integrity and clear strategic logic in the Dutch food industry context, moderated by its limited executional scale as a single-asset digital campaign and the absence of publicly verified performance metrics.
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