By Uwin Lugoda
The resultant curfew and trade disruptions of Covid-19 severely restricted access to fruits and vegetables, depriving many households of essential food items that were staples pre-pandemic. However, the silver lining was that the situation gave rise to a sustainable trend of consuming homegrown foods by pushing more locals to grow fruits and vegetables in their homes.
Seeing this rising trend and the Sri Lankan Government’s efforts to encourage self-sufficiency through such processes, Gamma Pizzakraft Lanka (Pvt.) Ltd., a company that has been in operation in Sri Lanka for the last 26 years and is also the local franchisee for Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, has introduced a new campaign named “Aswedduma: Sowing seeds to nurture Sri Lanka”. The campaign is a CSR (corporate social responsibility) project aimed at encouraging its customer base to live a sustainable lifestyle through homegrown vegetables and helping through that journey.
The franchisee executed this project via their Pizza Hut network of 70 outlets and 2,000 employees spread across the island.
In an Interview with The Sunday Morning Business, Gamma Pizzakraft Lanka Director of Human Resources (HR) and Administration Kaushal Mendis stated that this programme was announced on 3 June on their social media platforms and initiated the very next day on 4 June.
He explained that during the lockdown period, the company found itself grounded and saw what society was going through due to the difficulty of securing essential goods such as vegetables. He stated that this was especially the case in the first few weeks of the lockdown, when people did not have time to prepare for the long curfew period.
However, Mendis stated that when they got approval and began deliveries on 27 March, making an average of 75,000 house calls per month, they also noticed the growing trend of the home gardening concept in Sri Lanka. Due to this, the company had decided to get involved in the trend and help people grow their own vegetables.
“We had a lot of challenges initiating a project like this because we had to figure out the framework and find enough seeds. But we had an advantage in the form of the largest permanent employee rider pool in the country that had a greater level of wiliness, commitment, and comradery to get involved for the good of the organisation and country,” he noted.
Operating mostly in urban and semi-urban districts as well as major cities in other districts, Mendis stated that they had to take into consideration the amount of land available for growing vegetables as many customers mainly live in houses with small garden spaces or in apartments. Therefore, the company had opted for the distribution of vegetables that can be grown in pots. This includes six varieties, namely chilli, capsicum, leek, nokol, cabbage, and tomato.
“We have given our riders the seed packs so that when they deliver any order, they can explain the campaign to the customer and give them a pack of their choice if they want one.”
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Gamma Pizzakraft Lanka Director of Human Resources (HR) and Administration Kaushal Mendis[/caption]
The company has invested close to a million rupees in the project, having planned to distribute 125,000 seed packs during the month of June, with each region getting an appropriate number of seed packs depending on their delivery volume. Taking a district with an average monthly delivery volume of 10,000 for example, Mendis explained that around 11,000 to 12,000 seed packs would be given to that district.
He stated that they look to run the seed distribution stage of the campaign for a month and then use the next three months to focus on helping customers through their journey of home gardening and have them engage with the campaign via two social media pages specifically created for the campaign on Facebook and Instagram. The purpose is to allow customers to show their progress through pictures and videos, while also learning good practices and innovative ways when it comes to growing vegetables.
“We have also included a QR code behind each seed pack for the customer to scan and go to our web portal to get instructions on how to grow the plants and benefit from them, so that the awareness factor is also being taken care of,” explained Mendis.
He further stated that the campaign is solely carried out by internal employees with no third party involvement, from the stages of sourcing the seeds to getting them packed and delivered to the customers. He went on to state that the employees happily volunteered as they saw this as an opportunity to take part in a national exercise for the greater good by involving the local communities in a sustainable project.
“Another great thing about the campaign is that we are getting both customer involvement and employee involvement, the two main stakeholders of the company. Right now, we are halfway through the first phase and have distributed close to 50,000 seed packs. Our next stage would also involve quizzes and other engaging posts for customers so as to encourage them to share what they have done so far,” he said.
Mendis explained that when customers start posting the different stages – from planting of the seeds to the ripening of the vegetables – on the social media platforms, it will act as consumer-generated content, which is far more powerful than company-generated content, and will attract more people towards the trend.
According to Mendis, the main purpose of keeping the campaign pages separate from the official Pizza Hut social media pages is because they did not want to make it a marketing exercise. Instead, he stated that they wanted people to rally around a good cause and talk about it, eventually influencing others to do the same.
This influence has already seen growth, Mendis pointed out, adding that several other companies have also requested seeds from them for “World Environment Day” which saw the distribution of seed packs to around 50 to 60 employees in those organisations.
He explained that as for customer enthusiasm, they gage it in two ways. The first indication of customer enthusiasm is the growing number of traffic to their web portal and social media platforms from the customers. The second is when the riders give the seed packs to customers as it is the first point of contact. He stated that the amount of appreciation they receive from customers via their riders is enormous, and sometimes customers have even asked for an extra seed pack. Due to this, the company has empowered their riders to take a situational call on whether they want to give out more seed packs to a customer or not.
Since the lockdown has been lifted, Mendis claimed that Pizza Hut deliveries are now averaging at about 100,000 to 120,000 deliveries a month, and hopes that this will spread the trend of homegrown vegetables.
“Right now, we see a lot of viral trends that are either less productive or negative, so we wanted to take this kind of good and sustainable habit and make it a viral trend as well,” Mendis shared.