The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Imperial built an AI to send confiscated seashells back to their exact beach
Costa Rica's Imperial found seized shells had no legal way home, so it trained an AI to return 150,000 of them to their beach.
Imperial (FIFCO) · University of Costa Rica
the move
Imperial, Costa Rica's iconic beer, was losing the sustainability conversation to global brands that spent heavily on purpose marketing. Yet a real environmental gap sat untouched: beaches were being stripped of shells.
The law protected the beach but had a hole. Taking shells was illegal, and thousands were seized at airports every year — but with no way to trace a shell to its home beach, they could never be returned, so the protection was a dead end.
Rather than make a campaign about the problem, Imperial built the missing link. It worked with the University of Costa Rica to collect 18,000+ images and train an AI that could classify a shell's coastal ecosystem, then mobilised volunteers to sort and return the confiscated shells.
Between 2024 and 2025, more than 150,000 shells were classified and returned to their beaches, and the project became a working model of technology, policy and society aligning around restoration.
why it works
- It solved a real regulatory failure rather than talking about sustainability, so the action was credible.
- The AI made a previously impossible return path possible at scale.
- Volunteers turned the fix into a public movement, not a corporation's press release.
- The ecological result was concrete and measurable, unlike most brand purpose work.
what transfers
When a rule is well-meant but incomplete, build the missing piece instead of advertising the problem. Fixing the loophole earns more credibility than any purpose message.
what came after
The story reached more than 75 countries through earned media, and a new operational protocol now lets the reintroduction continue. In 2025 a Kantar study recognised Imperial as Costa Rica's most sustainable brand for the first time, showing how real action rather than messaging reshaped trust and leadership. The work also took Silver at Cannes and was shortlisted at The One Show.
references
- Imperial | Back Home — The One Show
- FIFCO cierra 2025 con avances en sostenibilidad (De Vuelta a Casa)
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