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It was the torrent of information released during last year’s Evening Standard food waste campaign that led Oli Frost and Josie Shedden to start toasting facts.

Eh?

Bear with me here.

Frost and Shedden, friends who met during an advertising agency internship in 2014 and now work as a copywriter and art director for AMV (Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO), read in autumn last year that ‘in the UK we throw away more slices of bread a year than there are people on earth.’ As such they put their heads together and came up with a project called Edible Leaflets in which they ‘toast facts on how to waste less onto slices of bread and give them out in London.’

The phrases, which include ‘A breath of fresh air may kill me,’ ‘1 in 3 slices binned,’ ‘1 slice for every human on earth,’ ‘never too old to make croutons’ and ‘feed me to the ducks,’ are, says Frost, designed to “get people’s attention by tackling the problem in a fun way.”

This is not the first time the pair has collaborated to cause a sensation: two years ago, their Homeless Period campaign encouraging us to think about what it’s like for a homeless woman menstruating led 111,420 people to sign an online petition, and causing it to be raised in parliament in December. Earlier this year, Frost, Shedden and their co-creator Sara Bakhaty announced they had partnered with Bodyform to donate 200,000 packs of sanitary products by 2020.

“As a country we’ve got such a special relationship with bread,” believes Frost, with a reminder that “we invented the sandwich and the bread and butter pudding. So we find it surprising that we treat something we love so badly. It’s the best thing since… well, itself!”

The ambition of this project, he hopes, is “to find a partner to help us launch the idea on a bigger scale – it could be a bakery, a national supermarket, or even just a small sandwich shop.”

Here goes.

Why did you and Josie pick toast as the subject for a campaign?

Articles in the Evening Standard got our attention on the issue of food waste, and there are so many different areas within that. We started researching material, and after finding out that bread was the most wasted food, we picked toast as something to focus on. It’s actually one of the easiest things for people to take action on [yet] there’s a lot of misinformation on how it’s stored, the most controversial one being that bread should actually be stored in a cool dark place, not the fridge.

How did you come up with the slogans?

Once we’d had the idea, we went through lots of headlines and tried to take that information and add a bit more charm to it. Then we researched the typography design and worked with a designer to make the stencils, and of course we did quite a lot of testing to work out how to actually toast it.

How long and how have you been distributing your edible leaflets?

We’ve just started, so we’ve been out with a few loaves around Southwark and London Bridge over the last couple of weekends - it’s something that we’re mostly trying out at this stage. We’ve been out, given them out to people, and talked to them about it. It’s one of those things that you can’t obviously communicate to a huge audience just using bread. It’s more about doing something on a small scale, and then through doing something fun reaching a wider audience of people.

So how do people react? Do they eat or chuck the toast?

Most people are excited to be offered slices of things to eat. The biggest request is for jam or butter, which is now something that we’re working on! We start by explaining to people why we’re doing it, and then see where it goes. I guess the issue is more in the public consciousness since the Evening Standard ran its campaign around it, as it’s not something that people had on their radar before that necessarily. I think most people feel guilty when they throw things away, the main driver being that they feel they’re wasting money. Understanding the actual ecological side of that is much less common. I guess with bread, it’s way too easy to think of it as nothing special. I reckon one of the main ways to help the issue would be for supermarkets to sell bread in smaller-sized loaves. If people are mostly throwing away a third of it, surely that would make more sense than selling in bigger packaging?

What are you hoping will come from this?

It’s mainly an awareness thing. Our hope is that through enough coverage it will reach a much wider audience of people and to get it on the radar of supermarkets and other places, in order to start doing something about it. Ideally we’re looking for someone to partner up with.

You guys have worked together for almost four years, and have a variety of projects under your belt. Have you stopped people on the street for a project before?

It’s new to us in the sense of stopping people on the street with a specific idea. A few years ago we ran something just for fun called Adopt A Pigeon, where we took pictures of pigeons in Trafalgar Square, named them, then gave them out to people with an adoption card and asked for a 5p donation. That was really quite a pointless endeavour, and after that we decided to stop doing things in the street just because people are so difficult to actually stop.

So do you think having something edible to offer has been easier in that sense?

Yes, that’s what inspired us to get out there again - the idea of giving people actual toast.

It started with us having this information to go on, then we came up with the idea of using the bread as the medium to write it on, and we went from that to the image and then to the idea of actually doing a leaflet with it. And really the best thing about edible leaflets is that unlike real leaflets they can’t be ignored. Who says no to toast?! When information is edible, it’s much easier to digest.

To hear updates on Edible Projects, follow Josie + Oli on social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram - or visit their website.