70% of 12-18 year olds consume meat 3-7 times a week

Through different challenges and workshops, this study was carried out with the intention of finding out the relevance that young people give to meat proteins in terms of nutrition and to find out whether they would use them to achieve a balanced, nutritious and healthy diet.

When young people were asked to make their own shopping trolley, in which they were asked to select 10 products out of more than 100, they chose an average of 3 meat products. The highest scoring meat products were pork loin and ham shoulder with 10 votes, hamburgers with 8 votes and fuet with 6 votes.

Upon learning the results of the teams’ decision, Costa Brava Mediterranean Foods nutritionist and food expert Charo Errando concluded that young people perceive meat proteins as a basic element and that they prefer fresh foods to prepared foods, they choose the more natural format of cured meats such as ham shoulder over sliced ham.

In the competition, the meals were divided into four different times of the day. At breakfast, usually divided by the teams according to what they eat at school and what they eat at home, dairy products, vegetable drinks, fruit and cereals are the most common. The meat products that appear most often are sausages such as turkey and cured ham.

Lunch is the time chosen by the vast majority of teams (26 out of 28) to introduce meat into their daily menu. The most popular products are pork loin, chicken and steak combined with pasta, rice or vegetables.

Snack foods are similar to breakfast, although there is an increase in products containing sugar such as biscuits. Some teams choose sausages for snacks, but to a lesser extent than at breakfast.

At dinner, the most popular choice of the students to finish their menu is fish, only one team chooses chicken. A curious fact that the nutritionist would like to point out is that the most chosen options for both lunch and dinner are of animal origin.

Regarding the scores of the different teams, meat products have the best score in terms of taste with one point more, out of five, than fish and legumes. They also score best in terms of visual appearance, with at least one point more than the other products. In terms of ease of preparation they tie with three points with legumes and score one point more than fish. The aspect to be strengthened for meat products is sustainability.

In order to carry out this challenge, 2,023 surveys were carried out among people aged between 12 and 18. The conclusions of these surveys show that young people perceive their diet to be positive and adequate, although 30% of them do not directly relate eating habits and health. More than 75% eat 4 or more times a day. When it comes to food, they consider that the best food groups are cereals, sweets and meat, although they are committed to a varied diet. They recognise meat products as the main source of protein, half of them like these products very much and only 20% think that they do not like meat very much, or not at all. 70% of young people say that they eat meat protein every day, or at least 3 times a week and only 2.45% do not eat meat.

An important part of the challenge was related to communication and marketing. When analysing communication campaigns with the contestants and asking them about the subject, they commented that their favourite campaigns are original ones that amuse or surprise them and those that show situations in which they feel represented. They highlight campaigns that are out of the ordinary and have interesting and ground-breaking initiatives, as well as those that use celebrities they are interested in. They also comment that most campaigns are discovered through social networks.

The study of this challenge, from 15 to 19 April, was divided into three workshops in which the different teams worked on their project through different steps.

In the first workshop, together with a nutrition professional, concepts related to food compositions, how to have a balanced diet and current consumption trends were investigated.

In the second workshop, together with a creativity professional, students were trained through examples of campaigns and explanations by the expert so that they could apply techniques to generate creative and innovative ideas and apply them effectively in their project.

And, in the third workshop, together with a communication professional, interesting ideas were generated to apply in each project, designing a prototype communication campaign for each group based on their results in the previous phases. In this workshop it was important to define a target audience and to foster communication skills and techniques.