The Brazilian dairy company Piracanjuba has launched an unusual social campaign to search for missing people. Together with Mães da Sé, an organization that helps look for disappeared people, the company began printing images of missing individuals on milk bags, “aged” with AI to show what they might look like today.
The idea echoes a well-known American practice from the 1980s, when photos of missing children were placed on milk cartons. Here, it has been combined with modern age-progression technology — algorithms that model facial aging.
Piracanjuba is one of the largest dairy brands in Brazil, and its products are sold across almost the entire country. The images appeared on about 300 million milk packages, especially in regions where the people were last seen. In the first months after the launch, reports said the project helped bring back eight to nine missing people.
The organizers believe that using a mass offline channel helps draw attention even where internet campaigns work poorly. And age progression technology, which many are used to seeing as a curiosity, has unexpectedly become a tool that helps families find loved ones again.
