With a fresh design approach, OUT TO LUNCH’s (Greece) “Kitchen Heroes” campaign for Prasino Ladi eschews tired clichés, celebrating everyday culinary champions by creatively blending photography and CGI to humanize the environmental impact of recycling frying oil. The result is a visually arresting, concept-driven series that engages and inspires, transforming an ordinary recycling message into a dynamic call to action.

By: Anna Stilianaki, Founder, Creative Director, & CEO, OUT TO LUNCH

What we had to deliver:  
An awareness campaign to inform people about a company recycling frying oil to produce biodiesel and urge them to take action. We thought it was not a very creative task. 

What we did NOT want to do:  
Create didactic, cliché ideas with dreary environmental damage facts or a call to action that recycled icon symbolism.  

What we DID want to do:  
Educate about benefits. Connect with the audience in a positive manner, building upon people’s pride in their cooking skills alongside significantly contributing to the environment. Convince through examples. Urge through a challenge. 

What we ended up with:  
An unconventional series of unlikely everyday heroes bragging about tangible results—not easy to calculate—in protecting the environment from their kitchens and challenging the rest of us to top them: a grandmother with sizzling fried fish, a woman ready to throw herself into battle with a pile of pans and a lid as her shield, a BBQ guy saving an entire building’s drainage system, and a young couple in a Delacroix-inspired scene taking up pans to join the movement. 

What we struggled with:  
A low production budget, which could not cover a proper photo session, let alone a series of images that we were convinced was needed to make a point and resonate with a massive and diverse audience with only cooking in common. A combination of photography and CGI was the only solution: It was time-consuming due to the long research, planning, and coordination needed, yet also liberating, as we could manipulate expressions and control props and details, like the kitty curling around Grandma’s legs. The challenge was to avoid a funny superhero spoof and produce a series of humane, lovable portraits of ordinary, unlikely super-achievers.  

What we love about the campaign:  
The attention-grabbing element of the prints and their impact. The images flattered and inspired people and got the client a major brand awareness increase, doubling their social media following in a couple of weeks and flooding them with an unmanageable amount of calls, questions, and comments by people and companies willing to join the program. The agency has won many awards, and it takes pride in having a powerful, creative, and successful portfolio case that proves there are no uninspiring tasks.

OUT TO LUNCH is an award-winning, independent creative agency based in Athens, Greece, with collaborators around the world. The agency has a flexible, progressive structure of inspired, experienced, and creativity-driven individuals who see the visual arts and design as a dynamic part of contemporary culture; they aim to create unconventional communication solutions for brands through powerful transmedia storytelling and ideas that inspire and build strong relationships between brands and people, companies and people, and between people themselves. 

Anna Stilianaki is a creative director, art director, and copywriter whose work has been recognized by every major advertising awards show, including Graphis, Epica, New York Festivals, and Golden Drum. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City and successfully led the creative departments of multinational ad agencies such as FCB, Leo Burnett, McCann Erickson, and Ogilvy as CCO before starting her own independent, multi-award-winning creative agency, OUT TO LUNCH, based in Athens, Greece.

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