'Donate Your Calories' says Sugar Free

The campaign aims to benefit and improve the status of school-going children in the country through their mid-day meal programme.

Here is an appeal for a donation that is certainly different. While almost 1.3 million children lose their lives to malnutrition, a large part of the urban population faces the risk of obesity and other lifestyle diseases caused by unwanted calories. Sugar Free, the sugar-substitute brand has launched a 'Donate Your Calories' to help nourish children' campaign in partnership with NGO Akshaya Patra Foundation.

The campaign aims to benefit and improve the status of school-going children in the country through their mid-day meal programme. The Donate Your Calories campaign kicked off in Mumbai and will soon go nationwide with promotions and on-ground activation. The campaign works on the tenet that every time a consumer uses Sugar Free, he or she saves unwanted calories.

The Sugar Free brand will donate these "saved" calories to Akshaya Patra, which, in turn, will help support and nourish school children by serving these calories as hot, nutritious meals. Every pack of Sugar Free will carry the campaign message and there will also be a multimedia campaign that will help spread the message across a wide consumer base. The campaign is supported digitally with the website donateyourcalories.com.

While the brand has been helping millions to cut bad calories from sugar in their food, this time around, the Sugar Free team, along with agency Contract Advertising, decided to take a step further by turning these bad calories into good calories with the help of the project.

iContract, Contract Advertising's digital arm, will drive awareness on social media, mobile and create a microsite to engage with new consumers who would like to live a healthy life and, at the same time, contribute in their own small way to society.

Says Ganesh Nayak, ED and COO, Zydus Cadila, "The idea stemmed from the insight that while a large proportion of India had excess calorie consumption leading to a state of unhealthiness or weight gain, an even larger proportion of India does not get a nutritious meal every day. We designed this campaign to create a calorie balance."

Commenting on the brief from Sugar Free, Kapil Mishra, executive creative director, Contract Advertising, says, "While the brief from Sugar Free is always on how to remove the bad calories from your diet, the question is who has created this perception of good and bad calories. Those who have access to calories can make this choice, but what about those who don't have access to food? This campaign helps us address this imbalance in a very non-invasive way to the consumer, while sticking to the core thought of the brand."

Sugar Free has a market share of 93 per cent and aims to woo people who are health-and fitness-conscious. Sugar Free is a creation of Zydus Wellness, a scheduled ancillary of the Ahmedabad-based Cadila Healthcare.