Food Miles Mapping

This artwork was noted by the award givers, Virgin Holidays & Responsible Tourism at at the Responsible Tourism Awards 2010 in which our client  won Best Hotel for the Environment.

Food Miles Mapping was the most recent method identified by webSEOlive to help boost the profile of one of our regular client’s eco-credentials, exemplary though their credentials are already! Hotel Mocking Bird Hill, Jamaica, is constantly on the look-out for new ways to raise their customers’ awareness of their efforts to work in a sustainable fashion within their community.  It is always great to work alongside such forward-thinking independent business owners with a green policy, not least as it allows us to think outside the box somewhat.

One of the most recent ventures webSEOlive undertook on behalf of Mocking Bird Hill was to focus the attention of their website users, actual local population and hotel+restaurant customers on their produce suppliers. These suppliers largely consist of local, small, independent businesses, many offering organic and/or sustainable products, often with the aim of providing support to the local rural economy and ensuring economic & similar ancillary benefits for the host community.

webSEOlive’s initial remit was simply to provide literature for guests at the hotel to read in the comfort of their rooms, but we felt that something more ‘visually impactive’ might be better, and ideally something that could be displayed easily online and in a more communal physical location. On this basis, we decided to go with a poster, incorporating a map of Jamaica and indicating all the suppliers, with a brief product description and giving their geographical distance from Hotel Mockingbird Hill (“food miles”).

To try and maintain an environmental theme we used old paper samples to make the backgrounds for the digital file, one for the map, done in a sort of antique treasure map style, the other the main poster, with virtual push-pins indicating the location of the suppliers; below the map the push-pins were used to “pin” smaller Polaroids of the produce with a little blurb in manuscript-style font. Despite the varied elements the overall design was we feel eye-catching and engaging.

This simple, pictorial device allows customers to quickly ascertain both the diversity and relative locality of the produce available at Hotel Mocking Bird Hill, emphasising the hotel’s worthy efforts to source locally and highlighting the other businesses in the vicinity providing quality products. Importantly, Hotel Mockingbird Hill is one of a very small number in Jamaica, possibly even unique, to source locally on such a scale and as part of a philosophical creed. The majority of other hotels in Jamaica rely instead on products shipped in from the US and all over the place, and do little to support the sustainable infrastructure of Jamaica itself…

Social Media also played a part in determining the poster’s affectivity; we ran it on Mockingbird Hill’s Facebook & Twitter pages; once it was up on Facebook the local suppliers, with access to the internet anyway, became fans, helping create a viral awareness for their own products, our client Mocking Bird Hill, and of course ourselves. This might even lead to some of these other independent producers looking at our services to see what we can offer them in the future… such is the advantage of cross-promotion, at a variety of levels!