The cost of wasted samples (and the case for getting it right)

Somewhere today, someone walking through a train station will be handed a product they didn't ask for. A can of something, maybe. An energy bar, a sachet of shampoo, a single-serve coffee.

They'll take it out of politeness, glance at it, probably bin it before their train pulls in, and forget about it by the time they sit down.

That sample was made in a factory. It was produced, branded, packaged in its own wrapper, boxed up in bulk, and shipped across the country to a person standing on a concourse, handing them out. The person who took it wasn't going to buy the product. The whole journey happened anyway.

Multiply that by every unsolicited sample handed out, posted, or dropped into a goody bag across the UK in a single week, and it stops looking like a small thing.

Today is Earth Day, which has prompted us to take stock of the work we do, how we do it, and the effect it has on the world outside our own balance sheet. Product sampling, done badly, has a real cost to the environment. Done well, it doesn't have to.

_.

What untargeted sampling really costs

Every untargeted sample carries two costs at once.

Commercially, a free product sent to someone who was never going to buy produces no purchase, no review, and no marketing opt-in worth having, so the spend is written off, and the data is dirty.

Physically, the same sample was still made, packaged, and moved, which means raw materials, energy, and fuel were all spent on a journey that was never going to matter.

Traditional sampling normalised this. 

Campaigns often stop at distribution. Nobody tracks what happened next, so nobody counts the waste on either side, and the physical cost of the model gets treated as an unavoidable part of it.

_.

Sampling that reaches the right people first

At Sampl, we care about accountability. To our clients, and to the environment we share with everyone else. One of the things that makes sampling with us different is SamplMatch, our proprietary technology that pre-filters every request so that samples only reach real, interested consumers who are likely to try the product and go on to buy.

Freebie hunters, duplicates, fraudsters, and low-intent consumers are filtered out before fulfilment. In 2025, that was more than 40% of sample requests across the platform.

That's more than 40% of samples that don't need to be packed, posted, or delivered, and the same share of budget that doesn't get burned on people who would never convert.

Better targeting means fewer samples sent to the wrong people. It's a cleaner way to run a campaign, and it's a cleaner way to run a business.

_.

Waste reduction, in real numbers

When Clarins launched Re-Move, they came to Sampl having seen previous online sampling end up on freebie sites, with samples going to people who had no intention of buying the product. The campaign targeted Clarins' Facebook audience, and every request was cleansed and authenticated through SamplMatch before a sample was approved for fulfilment.

More than 40,000 requests were filtered out. That's more than 40,000 samples of Re-Move that were never made up for dispatch, never packed, never loaded onto a van, never posted.

And the samples that did go out reached consumers with a genuine interest in the product:

77% of trialists went on to report purchase intent, 95% said they'd recommend it, and 60% opted in for future marketing.

That second part compounds. Clean, opted-in data from real customers means the next campaign starts with a better audience to target against, which means fewer wasted samples the next time around.

Precise targeting this time reduces waste next time too.

It's the opposite of how traditional sampling works, where the lack of data at the end of one campaign means the next one starts with the same guesswork as the first.

.

How Sampl stays accountable

Even with strong targeting, the samples that do get sent still have a footprint. A more efficient campaign isn't a zero-footprint campaign. Once we understood the scale of what running a sampling platform actually contributes to the physical world, we decided to overcompensate for what remained rather than offset at the minimum defensible level.

In July 2024, we partnered with Earthly to fund nature-based projects, with the investment tied to activity so it scales with the campaigns we run. The rate is 1 tree planted per 100 samples, and 1 tonne of carbon credits funded per 10,000 samples. Carbon credits are essentially a way of funding environmental projects to offset the carbon footprint of our activity.

The output against 2024 and 2025 volumes was:

• 2024: 12,160 trees planted, 119 tonnes of carbon credited
• 2025: 48,287 trees planted, 477 tonnes of carbon credited
• Social co-benefit: 233 days of fair-wage employment funded for communities working on the projects

These figures are reviewed on a continuous monthly basis as new campaigns go live, so the totals on our live Earthly dashboard will naturally move as the year progresses.

Earthly vets each project through a 106-point assessment.

Our current focus areas are mangrove regeneration in Madagascar and agroforestry in Kenya. Nature-based solutions can contribute up to 30% of the climate mitigation needed to stabilise the planet, which is why we back that category rather than pure offsetting.

The 3 costs that sit behind every sampling decision

Every sampling decision carries three costs. The cost to the brand if a campaign reaches the wrong people and the spend is written off. The cost to the data if the marketing opt-ins and reviews coming back aren't from real, interested consumers. And the cost to the environment if product is being made, packaged, and shipped to people it was never going to land with.

These aren't separate problems. The decision that wastes product tends to waste money and generate unusable data at the same time. Getting one right usually means getting all three right.

There's also something specific to the business we're in. Running a sampling platform creates shipping, packaging, and production demand that wouldn't otherwise exist. Some of that is unavoidable. The part that isn't needs to be actively reduced, not just compensated for. That means looking honestly at our own activity, not just the activity we help brands run.

The fact that reducing waste also improves campaign performance is what makes this a business decision, as well as having a positive impact on sustainability.

_.

Where we are on the journey

We're working towards B Corp certification. It's a process that takes time and forces an external standard onto the commitments we make, which is the reason we're putting the business through it.

Our long-term ambition is to plant 1 million trees and overcompensate for 10,000 tonnes of CO₂. Those numbers are where we're heading. The ones from 2024 and 2025 are the ones we're accountable for today.

_.

The real sustainability story

The real sustainability story in sampling isn't the tree that gets planted after the fact. It's the sample that didn't need to travel in the first place. Measuring that properly is the work, and it's inseparable from measuring commercial outcomes, because the same decision that wastes product wastes money too.

Earth Day is a reasonable moment to say this out loud. The work of keeping it honest is year-round.