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unveiled high-pro le awareness campaigns in recent

months. Lidl, for example, placed a heavy focus on

honey bees in its latest VitaMini campaign in the

Netherlands. VitaMinis are a range of so toy char-

acters, such as ‘Aukje Aubergine’ and ‘Aisha Appel’,

which are designed to encourage children to eat more

healthily. In the latest iteration of its campaign, the

retailer has released a special mascot called ‘Bibi Bij’,

to help raise awareness of the plight of bees.

Meanwhile, Delhaize has an ongoing campaign

called ‘The Buzzers’ in Belgium, to raise awareness

of the importance of bees. From June to August, the

retailer ran a promotion whereby shoppers received a

sticker pack of Buzzers characters for every €20 pur-

chase made. It also recently released an entertainment

app, which can be used to scan the stickers, causing the

characters to “come to life”.

And in May, McDonald’s built a mini ‘McHive’ in

Sweden. This was a to-scale replica of a McDonald’s

restaurant built as a functional beehive. The hive is a

collaboration between McDonald’s and Nordic creative

agency Nord DDB, to draw attention to the fact that sev-

eral Swedish McDonald’s restaurants have placed hives

on their roofs and hope to inspire others to follow suit.

In the UK, too, bees are an important focus.

Bees and other pollinators are vital for UK food

production, but they’re under threat. Is the food

industry doing enough to help protect them?

T

owards the end of last month, the UK

government sentenced a bee to death. It

was a rare species of Turkish bee, which

had been accidentally carried home in a

British family’s luggage. But, in a twist of

fate, the bee escaped the family’s home before the gov-

ernment could execute it, sparking concerns it could

infect British bees with unknown viruses.

Foreign invaders are, of course, just one of many

threats facing UK bee populations.

Insect pollinators, like bees, are responsible for pol-

linating around £690m worth of UK crops annually.

But many species are in long-term decline.

A May report published by WWF and Buglife revealed

that climate change, habitat loss, pollution and disease

are pushing some bees to extinction. The study, which

looked at bee populations in the east of England, found

17 species are now extinct from the area, 25 are threat-

ened and a further 31 are of conservation concern.

If those trends continue, the results could be cata-

strophic for food production. So what are food and

drink brands and retailers doing to help?

It certainly seems that pollinator health – and bio-

diversity more generally – are creeping up the corpo-

rate agenda. On the continent, several retailers have