A box of Kraft mac and cheese dinner on a wooden table with spilled cheese powder and a bottle of cheese powder pouring out, with part of a white chair visible.
A blue container of Kraft macaroni & cheese dinner with yellow and orange text and a smiling macaroni shape.
Text in large bold letters stating 'DINNER, NOT ART' with the word 'IN' stylized as a smaller letter inside the larger 'A' in 'ART', and the word 'INITIATIVE' at the bottom.

Stopping the Waste of Noodles On Art.

While Cultivating Young Imaginations

A person using a tablet to create a digital drawing of a cartoon dinosaur in a coloring app. The drawing features green lines and a smiling face, with a yellow sun and brown trees on a white background.

Every day, thousands of boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese are used to create inedible and quite frankly uninspiring macaroni art. What a waste of mac & cheese!

To help prevent this, we created “Dinner, Not Art”, an iPad app experience and site that allows anyone to make digital macaroni art instead.

Choose your canvas, choose a noodle shape, rotate noodles, size noodles, paint noodles and use the paintbrush to create your digital macaroni masterpiece.

To make sure the noodles you’re saving are given to the people that need them most, KRAFT donates 10 real noodles to Feeding America® for every digital noodle used, donating up to 110k noodles.

CASE STUDY

Blue display promoting making digital macaroni art and donating real noodles, with a timer showing 14,598 noodles donated, and a button labeled 'Create Mac Art'; surrounding items include scattered macaroni, glue, and yellow paint.
Close-up of hair strands in black and white, with the hair appearing slightly curled or wavy.
A digital game screen showing pasta pieces with a selection menu on the left and a 'Glue Down & Donate' button at the bottom right. The game involves placing pasta onto a white surface, with some pieces already scattered.
Tablet screen displaying a game where players create dinosaur shapes using macaroni pasta and glue, with a donation prompt and a timer.

Fridge Social Gallery

Those interested can also submit their masterpieces to Kraft Macaroni & Cheese’s Facebook page. We turned the cover photo into a social art gallery to put people’s art work on display, just like mom used to do, on a fridge.

A white refrigerator with colorful magnetic letters and a drawing of a dinosaur clipped to the door, with a spoon attached to the top.
Facebook page of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese featuring a digital drawing of a dinosaur made with green, yellow, brown, black, and purple magnetic pieces, with a spoon nearby.
Children's activity sheet with a blue whale illustration made out of macaroni, titled 'happy whale!' by Kelly, featuring a magnetic whiteboard, a metal magnet, and colorful letter magnets.
Colorful plastic pasta pieces resembling trees, animals, and scenery on a white surface, with some clouds and a flower.
Holiday classroom display with a snowman made from paper cutouts, a blue background with snowflake decorations, and the message 'happy holidays!' written in white. The display also features a yellow scarf on the snowman and a black top hat.
An extreme close-up of a finger's fingerprint. The image is black and white and shows the ridges and valleys of the fingerprint in high contrast.

The Most Charitable Macaroni Art

To create buzz and more awareness of the initiative and the app, we collaborated with American contemporary artist and environmentalist Tom Deininger to create the largest and most charitable piece of macaroni art ever using the “Dinner, Not Art” iPad app. Deininger used the iPad app to digitally make a massive macaroni mural, one frame at a time.

Large mosaic portrait of a man with long gray hair and a white beard, holding a handwritten note in a workshop or warehouse with high ceilings and large windows.

This finished 126-frame mosaic resulted in nearly 125,410 noodles donated to:

Feeding America logo with an orange wheat stalk forming the letter I in 'Feeding'
Close-up of a digital artwork of a person's eyes and nose made from macaroni pasta pieces, with donation counter and 'Make Your Own Macaroni Art' button.
Portrait of an older woman with gray hair, wearing a patterned jacket, holding a handwritten sign thanking donors. The background displays a colorful mosaic artwork. The website appears to be about creating charitable macaroni art.
Logo for a cooking or food-related app with a fork and a paintbrush crossed, set against a blue background with yellow text forming a clock around them that reads 'DINNER NOT ART'.

PRESS