Hong’s Kitchen fights Delhi air with an anti-pollution billboard

Ideated by Between Consultancy, the campaign took on pollution while promoting a range of comforting & tasty soups.

Every winter as the cold rises in Delhi-NCR, so does the pollution and the people are faced with multiple health problems. But this National Soup Day, an Indo-Chinese QSR called Hong’s Kitchen decided to take a small step to help reduce this pollution.

According to Avinash Kant Kumar, president at Jubilant Foodworks, “As a brand, we’ve always focused on creating little moments of joy for our customers. Which is why we established National Soup Day, as a way to do something good for the consumer while being able to talk about our soup.”

Armed with this brief of promoting their range of hearty, tasty soups for the winters of Delhi, the agency Between Consultancy thought to themselves, can the soup do more than just keep people warm? That’s when, inspired by the steam coming from a hot soup bottle, they came up with a unique solution to fight pollution in the city- the world’s first anti-pollution billboard.

Introducing Hong’s Kitchen “Soup-er Hero”, the soup that keeps you warm and safe. In a social experiment, they installed these giant bottles of soup with steam coming out of them on billboards in Delhi-NCR. But these weren’t ordinary soup bottles. Instead of steam, the bottles released anti-smog mist. This mist, using recycled water, settles down the pollution in the air & stops it from entering our lungs.

With live AQI metres on every billboard, people tracked the AQI levels around the city and the AQI levels in the area of the billboard. These Soup-er Hero billboards made a significant difference in reducing pollution levels in & around the area, leading to a substantial drop in AQI.

Not only that, it increased the eyeballs (and hands) on their soup bottles. Shrenik Cheddha, the founder of Between Consultancy chimed in saying, “This campaign was between consumer & client. It helped promote the comfort of warm soup on a cold winter day while helping with a real problem that every consumer faces everyday.”

In the future, the agency plans to take this technology ahead across multiple campaigns and brands to do their part in fighting this pollution. But in the meantime, people could finally enjoy a warm soup bottle in the cold winter without worrying about the pollution this National Soup Day all thanks to Hong’s Kitchen “Soup-er Hero”.