Scale an established food brand

As food and drink businesses grow, the creative challenge changes.

You’re no longer building everything from scratch.

You’re managing an established brand across products, ranges, retailers, campaigns, teams and channels, while still needing to respond quickly when something new comes along.

Toast provides established food and drink businesses with the creative expertise and capacity to keep brands consistent, relevant and moving forward.

From NPD and packaging rollouts to campaigns, websites and everyday creative, we can become an extension of your marketing team.

Talk to us about your brand

Growth creates complexity

A successful brand gets used everywhere.

And the more successful it becomes, the more people need things from it.

• New products need launching.
• Packaging needs updating.
• Retailers need assets.
• Campaigns need creating.
• Sales teams need presentations.
• Websites need developing.
• Marketing teams need support.

And everything still needs to look and feel like the same brand.

That’s where an experienced external creative team can make a real difference.

Creative support when you need it

Add capacity without adding headcount.

Internal marketing teams rarely have every creative specialism sitting in-house.

And even when you have designers, there are times when there’s simply more work than the team can comfortably handle.

Toast gives you access to an established multidisciplinary creative team without having to recruit additional permanent staff.

We work across:

• Branding
• Packaging
• NPD
• Print
• Campaigns
• Retail and POS
• Websites
• Digital
• Content
• Ongoing brand application

You can use us for a specific project or build an ongoing relationship around the support your team needs.

Brand application

Packaging and NPD

Managing large product ranges

Make complexity easier to understand.

As portfolios grow, product architecture becomes increasingly important.

Customers need to understand the range.

Retailers need to understand it.

Your sales team needs to explain it.

And your internal teams need clear rules for where future products belong.

We can help rationalise and structure growing product portfolios, establishing clearer relationships between master brands, sub-brands, ranges, products and variants.

That thinking can then be reflected consistently across packaging, websites, catalogues and sales materials.

Campaigns and retail creative

More creative exploration. Less wasted production.

AI-assisted ideation and iteration.

We use AI and other modern creative tools where they make our creative process more effective.

For established brands, that can be particularly valuable during early-stage campaign development, NPD, visual exploration and pre-production.

We can investigate more creative directions, explore imagery and visualise potential executions before committing significant budget to finished production.

That helps internal teams evaluate ideas earlier and gives our designers more ways to explore the brief.

It doesn’t mean handing your brand over to AI.

Strategy, creative direction, judgement and finished execution remain with our team.

AI simply helps us explore and iterate more efficiently.

Human expertise. Smarter tools. Better use of your creative budget.

When everything needs changing at once

We have the capacity for rollout work too.

Sometimes the challenge isn’t creating the idea.

It’s applying it 60 times.

A packaging change might need rolling out across an entire range.

New guidelines may need applying to existing materials.

Retail assets might be required in dozens of different formats.

A campaign could need adapting across multiple channels and territories.

Toast has an established in-house creative team capable of handling both the creative thinking and the production work required to get things delivered.

That means you don’t need one agency for the ideas and another supplier to make everything happen.

Websites and digital

Working with your internal team

We’re here to make their lives easier.

We’re comfortable working alongside marketing directors, brand managers, internal designers, product teams and other agencies.

Sometimes we lead the creative.

Sometimes we’re part of a wider team.

Sometimes we simply provide additional capacity when the workload spikes.

We don’t need to own every part of the process.

We need to understand our role, deliver what we’ve promised and make the overall team stronger.

Already have a lead branding agency?

That’s fine.

We regularly work with brands whose strategic identity has been created elsewhere.

You might have invested significantly in a specialist branding consultancy and want to retain them for major strategic projects.

That doesn’t necessarily make them the right resource for every packaging update, retailer request, presentation, campaign adaptation or everyday piece of creative.

We can work within existing guidelines and alongside your lead agency, providing the additional creative capacity required to keep the brand moving.

It’s not about replacing the right partner.

It’s about using the right team for the right work.

Brand guardianship

The more people who work with a brand, the greater the opportunity for inconsistency.

We can help protect the identity as it grows.

That can mean reviewing work, developing guidelines, creating templates, establishing clearer rules or simply becoming the team that knows when something doesn’t feel right.

But good brand guardianship isn’t about rigidly policing everything.

Brands need room to evolve.

Our job is to understand which elements are fundamental and where there’s space to do something new.

One team across multiple disciplines

Toast Food is part of Toast Design Consultancy.

Our wider team covers strategy, branding, packaging, print, websites, development, content, search and digital.

For established brands, that breadth is useful.

Instead of managing a different supplier for every type of creative requirement, you can bring more of the work together.

• One team.
• One understanding of the brand.
• Less briefing.
• Less duplication.
• More consistency.

Nearly three decades of creative experience

Toast was established in 1997.

Since then we’ve worked with businesses of all sizes, from startups to major organisations and household names.

That experience means we’re comfortable dealing with established brand systems, multiple stakeholders, demanding deadlines and the practical realities of delivering creative work within a larger business.

But experience doesn’t mean standing still.

We continue to invest in new technology, AI-assisted workflows and the skills required to help our clients operate in a changing creative and digital landscape.