To start the week off, Virgin Mobile is celebrating food with a feel good message that asks you to share your meals with the world in what will literally let others in the world gain a meal for free.
Starting this week, Virgin Mobile is encouraging anyone who normally takes pictures of food to apply a hashtag to their food photos with the aim being to help charity. By simply adding #mealforameal to your posts of food on major social networks, Virgin will donate a meal to someone who needs it, pairing with OzHarvest to deliver food to people who need it most across Australia.
Technically, the donation from Virgin isn’t a meal, mind you — Virgin doesn’t have a truck full of frozen dinners sitting ready to go. Rather, Virgin will make the monetary donation equivalent of one meal from your use of the hashtag, a move which will later on translate to a meal from OzHarvest for someone who needs it.
“These little pocket miracles we carry around with us every day are so powerful, they have revolutionised the way we communicate and also the way we live,” said David Scribner, Head of Virgin Mobile in Australia.
“This initiative, part of a wider campaign launched by Virgin Mobile called ‘Making mobile better’, will remind people of just how incredible these devices can be and mobilise Australians to turn their everyday mobile behaviour into a force for good.”
This writer adds a hashtagged croissant for both Bastille Day and #mealforameal. As a result of this post, Virgin will now buy someone a meal.
Virgin’s initiative will work for food photos published to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at this time, and the photos don’t have to be something exotic, with a photo of a muffin tagged with #mealforameal gaining just as much of a meal for someone in need as a photo of a plate of sushi or a spot of dessert from Gelato Messina.
In fact, the chefs at Messina are also behind the campaign, as are some other big chefs, including George Calombaris, Andrew Levins, and Adriano Zumbo.
“It’s hard to remember a day that one of my creations wasn’t posted to social media,” said Zumbo, adding that “the rise of the smartphone and food photography has gone hand-in-hand.
“While I definitely think it’s a positive that people are sharing a love of food with their phones, and the exposure for our industry has been incredible, I would also like to see how this phenomenon could have a more positive impact on the world. The mobile phone is such a cool device, why not use it to help those in need?”
Virgin’s campaign to help people who need food currently has no end date, and has an aim to hit 400,000 meals, though a representative for the company told GadgetGuy that Virgin “would love to go beyond this.”
The campaign starts now, so if you’re a social network user, make sure to add meaning to those food posts, and feel a little better about someone else as you fill yourself up at lunch.
