ITV and Veg Power's 'Eat Them to Defeat Them' turned veg-hating kids into an army

In 2019 the numbers were stark: 84% of UK children were not getting enough vegetables, and 90% of children knew vegetables were good for them — knowledge was not the problem. The five-a-day message had saturated public health for years without moving intake, and advertising aimed at parents kept losing the argument at the dinner table.

Veg Power, a not-for-profit built to increase vegetable consumption in the UK, joined forces with ITV, and adam&eveDDB created 'Eat Them to Defeat Them'. The strategy inverted public-health advertising: vegetables were cast as cartoon villains — killer sprouts, deadly cauliflowers — and children were recruited as the superhero army whose mission was to eat them. All the major UK supermarkets came together behind the idea for the first time, and a schools programme took the game into classrooms.

Because the child was the hero, the campaign changed who was persuading whom: children, not parents, became the ones asking for vegetables. The 2021 run, the third consecutive year, reached 42m people through advertising and 15.2m on social media; its evaluation found 59% of participating children and parents said children ate more vegetables, and 85% of schools took part again in 2022, pushing the programme past 1 million children.

Independent effectiveness data backed the silliness: Ipsos, profiling Effie-winning work, credits the campaign with 981 million extra portions of vegetables, and the case won a Gold at the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022. The idea kept returning in new guises each year, proving that a game children want to play can outlast the single-year health push.