Amsterdam-based banana bread startup SUNT celebrated National Banana Day in style this year, with a pop-up stand! The startup planned this one-day event to raise awareness of food waste and booked this Storefront pop-up space in the heart of Amsterdam on Prinsengracht.
The hook? Customers could exchange leftover or over-ripe bananas for banana bread. We took a deep dive into the pop-up shop’s concept with founder Laura Hoogland.
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
Behind the concept and goal:
[We planned] a banana bar on International Banana Day in order to raise awareness of food waste. People were welcome to hand in their old bananas and in return they got a free slice of banana bread.
The event took place on April 17th at the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. We invited a lot of major influencers to open the banana bar with us (FYI: we did not pay for the influencers to show up because we had a very slim budget for this event!).
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
My brand SUNT was the initiator of the event. We make healthy ready-to-go banana bread out of bananas that would otherwise been thrown away. Each year 75 billion bananas end up in a trashcan for no good reason. This makes bananas the biggest food waste offender in the world!
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
The goal with the banana bar was to gain awareness for SUNT and our banana breads. Plus, to get a lot of magazines and press to write about the brand and the initiative, which definitely worked. In the 2 weeks before the event we got a LOT of free PR. More than 10 major magazines such as Woman’s health, ELLE, Marie Claire and Dutch newspapers wrote about our banana bar. We also used the banana bar to reveal that we’re launching our banana bread at the biggest food retailer in Holland on April 29th!
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
About the pop-up store’s success and positive responses:
The event went very well! Not only did we have 10-15 major Dutch magazines writing about us, but 5 more journalists on the day of came to do an interview and take photographs of the bar [to be published].
We also had a lot of responses on social media; people all over the Netherlands were talking about it!
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
What made you choose this pop-up space?
The space was in the city center, just around the corner from Hearst magazines so I thought that was strategic so they could come over during their lunch break!
Photo: Anouk van Ravenhorst
The space itself was very open and inviting; you can open both the doors so it was very visible from the street so everyone could see what was going on inside the shop. Also it wasn’t overpriced! We could only host the event for one day because we’re just a start-up and don’t have a lot of money.
Arielle is the Communications Manager at Storefront. Beyond offering up insights on the future of retail and pop-up shops, she also loves to write, travel and watch documentaries. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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