Excess sugar consumption by children is a gigantic problem in the US. It is a key driver to serious diseases, such as child obesity and diabetes, both of which are risk factors for other illnesses such as heart disease and COVID-19.

To make matters worse, added sugar is in most packaged foods, but it goes by over 150 obscure names.

The thing is, health literacy isn’t exactly kids' favorite topic, so how do we raise awareness about the issue and drive behavior change without boring them to death?

We want to expose all of sugar’s disguises and turn kids, parents, and caregivers into sugar experts, and by doing what the food industry does every day: presenting ourselves as something kids love.

Idea Companies use over 150 different names for sugar that can be found in packaged foods’ ingredients lists, and these names are often obscure and scientific, making it hard for the average person to recognize.

People need to wise up to what the industry is doing, but it’s easier when they don’t feel like they’re being lectured. So, to fight big sugar, we created a Lil Sugar.

The music video is the main driver of a larger campaign; it’s an animation that fuses cute with menacing, and shows Lil Sugar, “MTV Cribs” style, bragging about his master plan of disguising itself to sneak inside people’s food, harming their health.

To give life to the character, we needed someone truly committed to the cause of health education, and who can reach not only younger audiences, but their parents too. Darryl DMC MacDaniels from RunDMC co-wrote and performed as Lil Sugar.

Strategy We knew we needed to hit two different timelines: the first addresses this crisis with the urgency it demands, and the second plays the long game, by generating long-term impact.

We always knew that in order to accomplish the first, we needed to raise awareness about hidden sugars in packaged foods everywhere; for the second, we needed to drive behavior change.

To drive awareness, the music video was aired via targeted donated pre-roll media and movie theater screening, but it also featured in community events, directly reaching students and educators.

The music video drives people to the Lil Sugar app, which gamifies dense health information, helping modify behaviors.

Execution Lil Sugar is more than the embodiment of sugar; it is the personification of decades of misinformation when it comes to clearly informing people about sugar’s presence in packaged products. The Lil Sugar illustrations capture this fact with tons of attention to detail. The illustrations were painted with gouache; a mixture of powdered pigment suspended in gum Arabic and honey, which are 2 forms of sugar. Each page is filled with a colorful and detailed background, yet never too busy so it doesn't steal the page attention from the character. The color palette is inspired by vibrant and powerful colors of the traditional candy shop universe. Whimsical at first glance, each disguise is actually the result of careful research into the relationship between sugar and culture. Molasses, for example, has been used to make rum for centuries, so we decided to make him a pirate captain.

Launched in October 2021 with online presence and growing participation in school curricula in key cities. Campaign is ongoing and gaining traction through more activations and community events.

Outcome The campaign already shows strong growth across the US, thanks to partnerships with community events, who so far reported 39,423 downloads specific to community events including Lil Sugar. 5,852 schools registered and reported participation of 3,089,107 students.

The most recent event is the Lil Sugar Nutrition Education Activity Contest, endorsed by the NYC Board of Education and which delivered health education activities for over 17,000 students.

The Lil Sugar campaign is becoming a grassroots movement with the power to turn everyone into a nutrition literacy advocate.

Educators are embracing the character more and more through online activity contests, with thousands of schools using Lil Sugar in their curriculums.

The campaign is steadily laying its foundations in key communities across the US, gradually becoming an effective, cost-free tool to teach health literacy.