Tropical Lush

Seeding the Future Foundation sponsored two students, ‘Gbenga Sadik and Marilia Ramos, to spend their summer internships in Nairobi, Kenya working with Partners in Food Solutions, a local non-profit that seeks to support food entrepreneurs and businesses. The students worked with Tropical Lush, a beverage company in Nairobi with a special value proposition of making a wide variety of fresh, natural fruit juices without additives or concentrates.

They executed two projects aimed at improving Tropical Lush’s business:

1) Developed a costing model that helps the company determine the unit cost of each of their juice products

2) Developed a nutrient profile for all the company’s juice products to help implement a nutrition-focused marketing strategy.

Did you know there are 147 “ecolabels” for food products alone? This number doesn’t even include the number of nutrition claims that are used. With so much consumer confusion and mistrust toward these labels, industry stakeholders have raised concerns about how to guide their labeling efforts. Based on interactions with the industry and the community, our team devised a survey to determine how customers view sustainability and nutrition when purchasing food products. By testing different packaging layouts and messaging techniques, we obtained qualitative and quantitative insights into what resonated most with consumers in terms of sustainable nutrition messaging. Our findings have identified specific strategies to communicate sustainability and nutrition through packaging, aiming to reduce confusion and increase consumer trust. We invite you to review our research and consider implementing our insights into your own company's labeling efforts.