Food brand application
You’ve built the brand. We’ll help you make the most of it.
Creating a strong brand is only the beginning.
As your food or drink business grows, that identity needs to work across new products, packaging, campaigns, sales materials, digital channels and everything else your customers see.
That’s where Toast comes in.
We work as an ongoing creative partner for food and drink brands, taking established identities and applying them consistently, creatively and efficiently across everything the business needs.
Turn brand guidelines into a working brand
Brand guidelines tell you how a brand should look.
The real challenge is making them work across hundreds of different applications.
A new SKU. A packaging update. A retailer promotion. A sales presentation needed next week. Social assets. An exhibition. A new landing page. A product launch.
Each one needs to feel unmistakably part of the same brand without simply repeating the same design.
Our designers get to know your identity, understand how it works and become a trusted extension of your team.
We call it brand application.
Helping Jack & Bry apply their branding
Jack & Bry came to Toast with the foundations of their brand already created by a larger London agency.
Our role was to take that identity and make it work across the growing number of things the business needed.
We developed and applied the brand across packaging and other creative materials, ensuring everything remained consistent while responding to the practical requirements of individual products and applications.
It’s a good example of what brand application is about.
You don’t necessarily need to reinvent your brand.
Sometimes you simply need the right team to make it work.
Everything your brand needs next
One creative team that already knows your brand.
Once we understand your identity and guidelines, we can support virtually every creative requirement that follows.
- Packaging and NPD — new SKUs, range extensions, packaging updates, nutritional changes, promotional packs and artwork.
- Campaigns and promotions — advertising, retailer campaigns, promotions, launch creative and seasonal activity.
- Retail and point of sale — POS, displays, retailer materials, exhibition graphics and other physical brand touchpoints.
- Print and sales materials — brochures, catalogues, presentations, reports, sales sheets and stakeholder communications.
- Digital — websites, landing pages, ecommerce, digital campaigns, email and online creative.
- Social — campaign concepts, templates, graphics and other branded social assets.
- Brand development — sub-brands, new product ranges, visual assets, illustrations, photography and additions to your existing brand system.
Your brand doesn’t stand still
Neither should your guidelines.
One of the problems with traditional brand guidelines is that they’re created at a particular moment in time.
Then the business changes.
New products appear. New channels become important. Retailers make new demands. Different people start creating materials. Situations arise that weren’t considered when the original identity was created.
We don’t just blindly follow the guidelines.
We understand the thinking behind them and help develop the brand intelligently as new requirements arise.
Where necessary, we’ll expand and improve your guidelines so that decisions made along the way become part of a stronger, more useful brand system.
Brand guardianship
Consistency without killing creativity.
The more a business grows, the more people touch its brand.
That’s when inconsistencies start creeping in.
We can act as brand guardians, helping ensure everything being produced remains recognisable, consistent and appropriate.
But brand guardianship shouldn’t mean making everything look identical.
Our job is to understand the boundaries of your identity, know when they should be followed and recognise when there’s room to push them.
That keeps the brand consistent without allowing it to become predictable.
Need 40 packaging updates? That’s fine too.
Brand application isn’t always about creating something new.
Sometimes the challenge is volume.
A nutritional update needs applying across an entire range. Forty packaging artworks need changing. A retailer needs a set of assets in different formats. A campaign needs adapting across dozens of executions.
Toast has an established in-house creative team, so we have the capacity to handle both the creative projects and the everyday work required to keep a busy food brand moving.
You don’t have to brief a new freelancer every time something comes up.
And you don’t have to use your branding agency for every production job.
You have a team that already knows what it’s doing.
Already working with another branding agency?
That’s not a problem.
Some of our clients come to us after working with specialist branding consultancies on strategy and identity.
Others have an established in-house brand that’s been around for years.
We’re equally comfortable with both.
We don’t need to have created the original identity to understand it, respect it and develop it.
We’ll get under the skin of the brand, understand the thinking behind the guidelines and become the team that helps put them into practice.
That can also free your original branding agency to concentrate on the strategic projects where they add the most value while Toast handles the ongoing creative requirements.
An extension of your team
Experienced designers without building a larger internal studio.
For growing food brands, employing specialists for every creative requirement isn’t always practical.
Working with Toast gives you access to an established team covering branding, packaging, print, websites, digital and content without having to build all of that capability internally.
You’ll work directly with the people doing the work.
As we get to know your business, briefs become quicker, decisions become easier and we build up valuable knowledge about your brand.
The result is less explaining and more getting things done.
Why Toast Food?
We’ve been helping businesses with branding and creative work since 1997.
Our team combines branding, packaging, print and digital expertise under one roof, which means we’re able to support brands across a much wider range of applications than a specialist packaging studio or individual freelancer.
We understand the practical side too.
Deadlines matter. Artwork needs to be right. Files need to be supplied correctly. Retail requirements change. Products launch when they’re supposed to launch.
Good brand application combines creativity with reliability.
You need both.