IZIKO Natural History Museum: Fossil Biscuits

With a severely diminished communication budget and almost no way to remind people they exist, Cape Town’s Natural History Museum was slowly being forgotten. So M&C Saatchi Abel created a special invitation to get children excited to visit the museum again.We took an iconic South African snack which all children know and love Zoo Biscuits and we adapted it to give children a taste of the museum's palaeontology exhibit.There’s a ritual to eating Zoo Biscuits. First you lick off the white icing animal on top, then you get down to the colourful icing and the biscuit below. Our Fossil Biscuits arrived blank on top with the instruction to lick through the colourful icing. When children did, they uncovered the skeleton of an African dinosaur fossilised within a dinosaur they were invited to visit at the museum the next day. Fossil Biscuits were sent to schools all over the city resulting in a number of school tours of the museum.
Each child who came left with an extra invitation for friends and school mates, making them each ambassadors for the museum.With a simple biscuit, a hidden treasure was rediscovered by the parents and children of Cape Town.