For more than a century, Dole has provided delicious and nutritious produce to millions of healthy-eating enthusiasts worldwide. Dole is committed to a healthy lifestyle through nutrition education as well as inspiring and encouraging people to adopt a healthier diet to include more fresh fruit and vegetables. It is our belief that a diet rich in fruit and vegetables can increase people’s nutritional health and reverse a number of negative health trends.

Promoting Healthy Eating 

At Dole plc, we’re all about promoting good health and well-being and finding the fun in fruits and vegetables. We’re consequently very proud to fly the flag for the fresh produce industry by being a main sponsor of the innovative, “Eat Them To Defeat Them” campaign in the United Kingdom. 

Far too often healthy products are overshadowed by less virtuous snacking alternatives on primetime television. The “Eat Them To Defeat Them” campaign, with its extraordinary reach-some 36 million people in 2022, seeks to address this imbalance. Dedicated to using best-in-class advertising and in-school programs to encourage children to eat more vegetables, the campaign places vegetables front and centre on primetime national television, engaging kids in a fun, irreverent way. 

Broadcast during “Must See TV” programming on the ITV channel across May, June and July the £3.5m TV campaign was complemented by a £1m above the line and digital campaign supported by Twitter, Spotify, Mumsnet and others. The schools intervention programme that accompanied the campaign saw 1 million children across 3,845 primary schools take part with tasting events and reward charts. The results were impressive with 57% of parents with children who took part in the school’s program finding that their children ate more vegetables and 74% of children agreeing it made eating vegetables more fun! 

Dole and Disney: encouraging kids to choose fruit 

Since 2016, The Walt Disney Company-owned movie characters have been appearing on Dole products such as bananas, pineapples, and vegetables at grocery stores throughout the U.S. and Canada. The motivation behind the multi-year collaboration is to give parents a helping hand in getting their kids to choose healthier meals and snacks, while giving kids an added reason to be excited about reaching for healthier foods. 

In addition to endearing and universally recognized characters appearing on banana stickers and pineapple tags, each custom-themed campaign includes Disney-inspired recipes, limited-time collectible sticker sets, digital downloads and interactive online activities for families to further engage with the brands’ wellness-focused initiatives. 

Disney’s movie characters have appeared on more than 24 billion servings of Dole produce since 2016 

Promoting nutrition education in schools 

In Greece, Dole has been funding nutrition education programs in schools in partnership with the Greek Ministry of Education since 2012. Each year, Dole-sponsored nutritionists hold hundreds of sessions with groups of students, to teach them about the principles of healthy eating. The programme has so far reached over 880,000 students and faculty in more than 5,500 schools, and successive governments have praised its value in helping to tackle the country’s growing obesity problem. 

Reducing childhood hunger in 2022 

In 2022 Dole renewed its national partnership with Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign to help end childhood hunger in America. The partnership was first launched in summer 2020 in response to school closures, as a result of COVID, when millions of US children faced the prospect of unreliable access to food. 

The partnership delivered direct product donations in impacted cities as well as nutrition education, wellness events and at-retail initiatives to ensure all children had access to three healthy meals a day. 

This year, to continue to counter the prolonged negative effects of the pandemic, Dole has again renewed its support as a national partner as well as sole presenting sponsor of a series of livestream wellness and fitness sessions called Get Fit for No Kid Hungry which raises funds to provide the healthy food these children need to thrive. 

“We care about being a positive force of change in people’s everyday lives,” said Melanie Marcus, Dole’s Nutrition and Health Communications Manager. “Addressing hunger and food insecurity for children is at the core of our purpose as a fresh produce company. Promoting health and wellbeing and driving consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables is one way we can help every day.”