About Toast Food

Toast Food is the specialist food and drink arm of Toast Design Consultancy.

We help ambitious food and drink businesses build, launch, grow and develop their brands.

We do this through strategy, identity, packaging, campaigns, websites and ongoing creative support.

We’ve been designing for businesses since 1997.

A lot has changed since then.

So have we.

We build brands for the real world

A brand doesn’t live in a presentation.

It ends up on packaging, websites, retailer presentations, social channels, exhibition stands, sales materials and hundreds of other places nobody thought about when the original identity was created.

That’s why we take a practical approach to branding.

We want to create distinctive brands with strong ideas behind them.

But we also want those brands to work.

They need to survive production.

They need to stretch across new products.

They need to make sense to customers.

They need to give marketing teams something useful to work with.

And they need to be capable of changing as the business grows.

That’s the kind of branding we like doing.

Food and drink is our thing

We’ve spent years getting to know the sector.

Food and drink businesses face a particular combination of creative and commercial challenges.

Products need to stand out in crowded categories.

Packaging has seconds to communicate.

New ranges have to fit with existing ones.

Retailers have their own requirements.

Production creates practical constraints.

Consumer tastes change.

And challenger brands are constantly finding new ways to make established categories interesting again.

We’ve worked across food, drink, FMCG, foodservice and hospitality for decades.

That experience means we understand the environment your brand has to operate in, not just how to make it look good.

From first product to established brand

We’ve worked with businesses at almost every stage.

Some clients come to us with an idea, a product and the ambition to turn it into a business.

Others have already built successful challenger brands and need help getting to the next stage.

And some are established businesses managing large product ranges, multiple markets and ongoing creative requirements.

The challenges are different.

So is the work.

We adapt the team and process around what you’re trying to achieve rather than forcing every project through the same agency formula.

• Launching a brand
• Growing a challenger brand
• Developing an established brand

Strategy and creative under one roof

Experienced people. New tools.

Nearly three decades in design doesn’t mean doing things the way we did three decades ago.

Creative technology is changing rapidly.

We’re embracing it.

Our designers use AI and other modern creative tools where they help us explore ideas, develop concepts, investigate visual directions and iterate work more efficiently.

Our digital and search teams are also adapting to the way AI is changing how people discover, research and interact with brands online.

We don’t use technology for the sake of it.

And we don’t hand creative decisions over to machines.

We use the right tools when they allow our experienced people to explore more possibilities, solve problems faster and make better use of our clients’ budgets.

Human experience. Human judgement. Smarter tools.

You’ll work with the people doing the work

We’re not an agency built around layers of account management.

Our clients work directly with experienced designers, strategists, developers and specialists involved in their projects.

That means fewer handovers, less interpretation and faster communication.

As the relationship develops, we get to know your business and brand properly.

For clients using us for ongoing creative support, that can make us feel much more like an extension of the internal team than an outside supplier.

Big enough to deliver. Small enough to care.

Toast has an established multidisciplinary team based in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

We’re large enough to provide specialists across branding, packaging, print and digital and to handle substantial ongoing creative requirements.

But we’re still small enough for people across the agency to know who our clients are and what’s happening with their projects.

That’s a balance we’ve deliberately maintained as the agency has grown.

Independent since 1997

Toast Design Consultancy was established in 1997 and remains an independent UK creative agency.

That means we answer to our clients and ourselves rather than a larger agency group.

We’ve built the business by developing long-term relationships, adapting as the creative industry has changed and continuing to invest in the skills and technology our clients need.

Toast Food brings that experience together specifically for food and drink businesses.

Toast Design Consultancy Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 04451696.

Our team

Our Studio.

We all work out of a Victorian townhouse in the centre of Banbury.

With the exception of Devan, all our staff are studio-based – for creative teams, this is the best way of working and means our clients get a truly creative team.

We have three floors (and a nice garden), with the branding and print team on the ground floor, the digital team on the first and then meeting rooms and creative space on the top floor.

We also have a lovely vaulted ceiling cellar, but no one fancies working down there.

You’re welcome to come and visit us!

Professional standards

We’re members of the Design Business Association, the UK’s trade association for the design industry.

The DBA champions the effective use of design in business and promotes professional standards across the industry.

We’re also accredited by the Good Business Charter, recognising our commitment to responsible business practices across areas including employees, customers, suppliers, tax and the environment.

These aren’t substitutes for doing good work.

But they provide independent reassurance about the standards we expect from ourselves as a business.

Trying to do business responsibly

We’re conscious that running a business and producing creative work has an environmental impact.

We operate a largely paperless studio, avoid unnecessary project travel and work with clients and suppliers to consider more environmentally responsible approaches to print, packaging and digital production where practical.

We also support environmental projects through Ecologi.

We don’t pretend we’ve solved sustainability.

We simply believe businesses have a responsibility to keep looking for better ways to operate.

What does it cost to work with Toast Food?

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

A founder launching their first product doesn’t need the same team, process or scope as an established food business repositioning a national brand.

So we don’t force projects into predefined packages.

We’ll start by understanding where you are, where you’re trying to get to and what needs to happen in between.

Then we’ll recommend an appropriate scope and provide clear costs before work begins.

That might be a focused piece of design work, a complete branding and packaging project or an ongoing creative relationship.

The important thing is putting the right amount of work into the right problem.

Talk to us about your project

Part of Toast