Zoeken

Tastee

Simone Maas
30 nov 2015
3 minuten om te lezen

T-shirts with prints of food have become a real thing over the last couple of years. When I searched for ‘shirt food’ on Google, I immediately got 181.000.000 hits. Walking around wearing a pizza-shirt is a perfect way to tell the world around you about your great love for pizza. It is a way to identify yourself by the food you enjoy, but beside that it’s just a really funny clothing piece to own. However, this subject also has a less funny side. In some countries people have to work hard everyday for the smallest meals. This is where Tastees comes in.

What is it? Tastees is an organisation with a beautiful website where you can order a T-shirt with your favourite meal written on it. At this moment you can unfortunately not fill in any meal. You have to choose from the 10 dishes they offer on their site’s menu. You receive your order at home in a really cute packaging, a pizza-box. Also every shirt has its own number on it, which makes every single one of them unique. Besides handing over a nice and good quality shirt to the costumer, Tastees want to make a greater difference.

For every shirt you order, 4 euros go directly to the UN World Food Programme. The main goal of this programme is to actualise Zero Hunger. With only 4 euros they can provide 20 children with a lunch or give a family a cooking stove for a year to prepare their own food via the SAFE programme. This initiative of Tastees is their ingredient for #arecipeforzerohunger.

Another world problem Tastee covers with their T-shirts is sustainability. Their shirts are made from 100% biological cotton fabric. For growing this cotton no pesticides where used. Pesticides are harmful for the worker’s health, the rivers and the fields. Therefore, using no pesticides at all is a more sustainable alternative. Even the making off is done using only environmental-friendly materials and paint.

Why is it cool? T-shirts with all kinds of lettering on them have been around for a while now. The same counts for shirts with prints of delicious food. The thing where Tastees distinguishes itself from other products like this is the story they tell. They want you to take a moment to think about world hunger, a big problem that most of us luckily don’t know in our daily lives. Ordering a shirt from this website is a different experience, because you know you are contributing to a greater goal: realising Zero Hunger.

Tastees is a great exemple of both the megatrends ‘Experience Economy’ and ‘Cool Involvement’. The fact that you are helping other people in the world becomes maybe even the most important reason for you to buy this shirt. Let’s be honest, you can get a shirt with a simple funny text like this way cheaper somewhere else. However, this feeling of self-fulfilment does the trick for Tastees. The price is worth the experience, and the experience becomes (a big part of) the product.

Tastees also makes you feel more connected with this people in need. We want to involve others and get involved by others. By making costumers think about world hunger, they feel more emotionally involved with people on the other side of the world. When they eventualy order a T-shirt, they know they meant something for others by providing them with a meal. A connection between two complete strangers is born.

In short Tastees is a brand that at first caught my eye because of the funny printings like ‘boerenkool’ and ‘wentelteefjes’, but there’s a lot more to it. Their shirts are produced in a way that does no harm to the environment and they even contribute to reducing hunger in developing countries. Tastees is an organisation with ambitions way beyond making clothing!