AI-assisted creative for food and drink brands
Explore more ideas. Iterate faster. Make your creative budget work harder.
AI is changing the way creative work gets done.
Used well, it can help food and drink brands explore more ideas, investigate more creative directions and visualise possibilities much earlier in a project.
That can be particularly valuable for startups and challenger brands where budgets are finite, and every pound invested in branding, packaging and marketing needs to work hard.
At Toast, we use AI alongside traditional creative tools to help our designers research, explore, experiment and iterate more efficiently.
It doesn’t replace experienced designers, writers, photographers or strategists.
It gives them better tools.
And that can mean more creative exploration for your budget.
Talk to us about your brand
AI changes the economics of creative exploration
Some of the most expensive creative work happens before you know what you want.
Developing a brand has always involved exploration.
- What could the brand look like?
- What visual territory should it occupy?
- How could the packaging work?
- What photographic style feels right?
- How should the brand speak?
- What might the website look like?
Traditionally, every direction takes time to create.
The designer needs to make something before you can see it, discuss it, reject it, develop it or take it somewhere else.
AI can accelerate parts of that exploratory process considerably.
It allows our creative team to investigate possibilities, test thinking and visualise directions without necessarily spending hours manually producing every exploratory idea.
The result isn’t less creativity.
It’s an opportunity for further exploration before the budget is spent on detailed execution.
More thinking. Less speculative production.
There’s an important distinction between creative thinking and creative production.
Coming up with the right idea requires understanding, experience and judgement.
Producing something simply so everyone can see what the idea might look like can take considerable time.
AI can help close that gap.
A designer can explore an idea, visualise it, evaluate it and move on much more quickly.
If it doesn’t work, relatively little has been lost.
If there’s something interesting there, we can take it further.
For brands working with constrained budgets, that’s potentially very powerful.
Ideation
Get further away from the first obvious answer.
The first idea isn’t always the best idea.
AI can help us explore a brief much more widely during the early stages of a project.
We can investigate themes, associations, visual metaphors, language, cultural references, imagery, and alternative approaches to the same problem.
But generating ideas isn’t the difficult bit.
Knowing which ideas are worth pursuing is.
Our creative team uses experience and judgement to direct the exploration, identify what’s interesting and discard what’s generic, inappropriate or simply not very good.
AI increases the territory we can explore.
The designer decides where we go.
Get the ‘feel’ of it.
Working with AI opens up a new world of being able to explore ‘feel without burning hours of the budget. Different options around the same concept can be engineered so that brand owners can explore and ultimately dismiss different creative directions without the traditional associated costs.
This removes some of the frustration previously experienced in the design process, where presenting the options ‘just to see what it looks like’ added costs to the project for creative direction that was then shelved – but it still needed to be explored.
Iteration
What if we tried this instead?
Creative development involves a lot of “what if?”
- What if the image were more natural?
- What if we pushed this towards premium?
- What if it felt more playful?
- What if we took everything away?
- What if the product was shown in a completely different environment?
- What if we combined these two ideas?
Historically, some of those questions could mean significant additional production time.
AI can make certain types of iteration much faster.
That gives designers and clients more freedom to explore an idea before deciding whether it’s the direction worth investing in.
For a startup or challenger brand, that can mean getting significantly more from the exploratory stages of a project.
Brand exploration
See different worlds before choosing the one you want to build.
Early brand development is about finding territory.
- Bold or understated?
- Contemporary or traditional?
- Playful or authoritative?
- Natural or scientific?
- Accessible or premium?
- Familiar or disruptive?
Rather than discussing those ideas purely in abstract terms, AI-assisted workflows can help us visualise potential brand worlds much earlier.
We can explore imagery, textures, environments, art direction, typography references, illustration styles and broader visual language.
These aren’t necessarily finished brand assets.
They’re a way of seeing possibilities earlier, so better-informed creative decisions can be made before detailed design begins.
This is happening, let’s not pretend otherwise.
You still need strategy and positioning to start with and professional creatives at the end to deliver the project, but what happens in between is changing rapidly.
AI tools provide a never-before-experienced opportunity for brand owners to work differently with a creative agency. This isn’t about doing less; it’s about exploring more in a more efficient, budget-friendly way.
The simple truth is that, however you arrive at your perfect logo and packaging mock-up, it still needs to be professionally put together for production.
We’ve worked with hundreds of brand owners who love to see every iteration possible of how their brand and packaging could look. Now that we have tools that can deliver that quickly, it would seem rather stupid not to utilise them.
Logo exploration
More routes don’t have to mean more finished logos.
AI can also support aspects of logo and identity exploration.
That does not mean asking an AI image generator for a logo and handing the result to the client.
A professional identity needs to be distinctive, appropriate, reproducible and usable across a wide range of applications.
It also needs someone who understands why it looks the way it does.
Where AI becomes useful is in exploration.
It can help investigate symbols, visual associations, stylistic territories, forms and unexpected connections around a brief.
Our designers can use that material as an additional source of creative inspiration before developing the identity using professional design tools and processes.
AI can help us explore. The finished identity is still being designed.
Tone of voice
Explore how your brand could sound.
Finding a brand voice involves experimentation too.
- How would this message sound if the brand were more confident?
- More knowledgeable?
- More playful?
- More direct?
- Less corporate?
- What words feel natural?
- Which ones feel forced?
AI makes it possible to rapidly explore different verbal territories and interrogate how a potential tone might behave across different situations.
Our copywriters can then develop, edit and refine the strongest direction into something distinctive and usable.
This is particularly useful when creating:
- Brand personality
- Tone of voice
- Messaging
- Headlines
- Packaging language
- Product descriptions
- Campaign concepts
AI can generate a lot of words.
The expertise is in deciding which ones your brand should actually use.
Website design
Explore the experience before building it.
Websites contain a lot of moving parts.
- Structure.
- Content.
- Messaging.
- User journeys.
- Layouts.
- Imagery.
- Functionality.
AI can assist our digital team at several points in the process, from early content and structural exploration through to visual ideation and prototyping.
It can help us investigate alternative ways to organise information, explore interface ideas and rapidly visualise concepts before committing significant development time.
That’s particularly important because development is the expensive place to discover that an idea doesn’t work.
The more we can establish during strategy and design, the more efficiently the finished website can be built.
Food photography
See the shot before you pay to shoot it.
This is one of the areas where AI-assisted creative work can have a very tangible impact on budgets.
Professional food photography can involve:
- Photographers
- Food stylists
- Props
- Locations
- Studios
- Lighting
- Ingredients
- Retouching
- Production time
Once everybody is on set, experimentation costs money.
AI can help us explore photographic ideas beforehand.
We can investigate composition, lighting, styling, backgrounds, props, camera angles and broader art direction before the shoot takes place.
That gives the photographer, stylist, client and creative team a much clearer shared understanding of what we’re trying to create.
Instead of using expensive studio time to discover the direction, we can arrive with much more of that thinking already done.
Packaging photography
Plan imagery around the actual pack.
Photography for food packaging is particularly demanding because the image must fit within a predetermined space.
It may need to accommodate a logo, product name, flavour, claims, mandatory information, and other design elements.
AI-assisted visualisation allows us to investigate potential compositions within the packaging design before commissioning finished photography.
- Where should the product sit?
- How much negative space do we need?
- What angle works?
- How tightly should it be cropped?
- What ingredients should appear?
- How does the image interact with the rest of the pack?
Answering more of those questions before production can reduce experimentation during the shoot and help make sure the finished photography actually works within the design.
Sometimes, AI-generated imagery may be the finished answer
But not always.
There are situations where generative imagery may be appropriate for finished creative work.
There are others where professional photography, illustration, CGI or another production method is clearly the better choice.
We’re not interested in using AI simply because it’s available.
We’ll consider the quality required, how the imagery will be used, consistency, production requirements, brand implications and budget before recommending an approach.
- Sometimes AI is the production tool.
- Sometimes it’s the visualisation tool.
- Sometimes we won’t use it at all.
The creative requirement should determine the tool, not the other way around.
Where the savings actually come from
AI doesn’t make expertise unnecessary. It can make the process more efficient.
The potential saving isn’t about removing the designer from the project.
It’s about reducing some of the time traditionally required to investigate, visualise and iterate ideas.
Instead of spending five hours manually producing an exploratory route that gets rejected, we may be able to establish much earlier whether the underlying direction has potential.
Instead of using part of a photography day experimenting with backgrounds, we can investigate them beforehand.
Instead of developing one or two visual territories because that’s all the budget comfortably allows, we may be able to look more widely before choosing where to concentrate our effort.
That means more of your budget can be directed towards the things that matter most:
- Strategy
- Creative direction
- Original thinking
- Professional design
- Refinement
- Craft
- Production
- Implementation
It’s not necessarily about doing the whole project for less.
It’s about getting more value from the money you’re already investing.
Particularly useful for startups
When every pound matters.
Launching a food or drink brand involves many competing costs.
- Product development
- Manufacturing
- Packaging
- Compliance
- Stock
- Photography
- Websites
- Marketing
- Distribution
- Branding
You can’t afford to explore every creative possibility through expensive traditional production.
AI-assisted workflows can give founders access to a broader creative exploration without allowing the early stages of the project to consume disproportionate amounts of the launch budget.
You still get experienced creative people making the decisions.
They simply have more efficient ways to explore what’s possible.
Powerful for challenger brands
Move quickly without lowering the creative bar.
Growing brands face a different problem.
There is always something else that needs doing.
- A new SKU.
- A retailer presentation.
- A campaign.
- New photography.
- A packaging development.
- A website update.
- Social content.
The ability to explore and iterate quickly can help challenger brands respond to opportunities without every new requirement becoming a major creative production exercise.
Used intelligently, AI can give a smaller brand some of the exploratory capability that historically required much larger budgets.
Explore growing a challenger food brand
What AI can’t replace
AI is extremely capable.
But generating something isn’t the same as knowing whether it’s good.
- It doesn’t understand your business in the way a team that’s worked with you does.
- It doesn’t take responsibility for the commercial decision.
- It doesn’t inherently know when an idea is too close to a competitor.
- It doesn’t know when something simply feels wrong for your brand.
- An infinite number of options isn’t useful if nobody knows which one to choose.
That’s where experienced creative people remain essential.
Direction. Taste. Judgement. Experience. Craft.
AI can amplify those things.
It doesn’t make them obsolete.