Food branding & identity

Build a brand people want to buy

A great product gives you something worth selling

A great brand gives people a reason to notice it, understand it, remember it and choose it.

Toast helps ambitious food and drink businesses create distinctive brands built to compete.

From positioning, naming and identity through to packaging, websites and launch creative, we bring strategy and design together to turn products into brands.

Talk to us about your brand

Branding for ambitious food and drink businesses

Food and drink is an incredibly competitive market.

Whatever you’re making, there’s a good chance your customers already have plenty of alternatives.

Your brand (which is far more than just your logo design) needs to give them a reason to choose you. That starts long before the logo.

We look at your product, audience, market, competitors and ambitions to understand where the opportunity lies. Then we turn that thinking into a brand that’s distinctive, relevant and capable of growing with the business.

We work with new products preparing to launch, challenger brands looking to grow and established food businesses ready for change.

Launching a new food brand?

Turn your product into something people can believe in.

You’ve developed the product. Perhaps you’ve found a manufacturer, started speaking to retailers or begun looking for investment. Now you need to turn the idea into a credible brand.

We can help establish the foundations before jumping into design.

Who is the product for?
Why should they care?
What’s genuinely different about it?
Where does it sit within the category?
What should the brand stand for?
How should it look, sound and behave?

Getting those decisions right gives the creative work something meaningful to build on.

From there, we can create everything you need to take the brand to market.

Strategy and positioning
Market and competitor review
Naming
Brand story and proposition
Visual identity
Packaging
Brand guidelines
Website and digital
Launch creative

Talk to us about launching your brand

Growing a challenger brand?

What got you here might not get you there.

A lot can change after launch. You understand your customers better. The product range grows. New competitors arrive. Retail opportunities appear. Your ambitions become bigger.

And sometimes the brand that got the business started isn’t strong enough for where you’re trying to take it next.

We help growing food and drink brands work out what should change and, just as importantly, what shouldn’t.

That might mean sharpening the positioning, evolving the identity, redesigning packaging, restructuring the range or undertaking a more substantial rebrand.

The objective isn’t to change for the sake of it.

It’s making the brand more effective for the next stage of growth.

Rebranding an established food brand?

Evolve without throwing away what already works.

Established brands have something startups don’t. Recognition. That has value.

So before changing an existing food brand, we look carefully at what customers already recognise, what still works and where the problems actually are.

Sometimes a brand needs reinvention.
Sometimes it needs evolution.

Sometimes the identity is fine and the real problem lies with the packaging, positioning, product architecture or how consistently the brand is being applied.

We’ll help you identify the right problem before designing the solution.

Brand audits
Research and competitor review
Repositioning
Brand evolution
Rebranding
Packaging redesign
Product and range architecture
Brand guidelines

Strategy before decoration

Understand where you want to stand before deciding what you should look like.

Good branding isn’t simply about creating something attractive.

It starts with making decisions.

Who are we trying to reach?
What do they need to understand?
What makes this product different?
Who are we competing with?
What space can we credibly own?
Why should anyone care?

The amount of strategic work required varies from project to project.

Some businesses come to us with extensive research and a clearly defined proposition. Others have an excellent product and little more than an idea of who might buy it.

We don’t force every client through the same process.

We’ll work out what’s already known, what’s missing and what we need to establish before moving into creative development.

Creating your brand identity

Turning the thinking into something people recognise.

Once we’ve established where the brand needs to stand, we turn that strategy into a visual and verbal identity.

Depending on the project, that might include:

Naming
Logo and marque
Typography
Colour
Graphic language
Illustration
Photography direction
Tone of voice
Messaging
Packaging
Brand guidelines

The result is more than a collection of individual design elements.

It’s a system designed to make your brand recognisable wherever people encounter it.

Packaging that competes

For many food and drink businesses, packaging is the most important expression of the brand.

It’s where strategy, identity, product information and commercial reality all meet.

We’ll develop packaging alongside the wider identity so the two work together from the beginning.

And we’ll think beyond the first product.

If you’re planning different flavours, formats or future ranges, we’ll consider how the packaging system can grow without losing clarity or recognition.

Explore food packaging design

Our branding process

A process that fits the project, not the other way around.

No two branding projects are identical.

A founder with a completely new product needs something different from an established manufacturer repositioning a twenty-year-old brand.

So while we have a proven process, we adapt it around the project.

A typical branding project might the stages below; You might need every stage.You might need three of them.

We’ll recommend the process that makes sense for your project.

Discover

We get to know the business, product, audience, market, competitors and commercial objectives.

Define

We establish the positioning, proposition, personality and strategic direction for the brand.

Explore

We investigate different creative territories and establish the strongest direction.

Create

We develop the identity and turn the chosen direction into a complete visual system.

Grow

We stay involved as new products, ranges, campaigns and opportunities emerge.

Apply

We bring the brand to life across packaging and the other applications required for launch.

More ideas before committing the budget

AI-assisted exploration, led by experienced designers.

We’re embracing the opportunities AI creates for the design process.

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

For food brands, that can be particularly valuable during the early stages of a project.

We can explore more possibilities, visualise ideas earlier and discard weaker directions before significant time and budget are committed to production.

That can make creative exploration faster and more cost-effective without handing the creative decisions over to a machine.

AI doesn’t decide what your brand should be.

Our designers do.

Human strategy. Human judgement. Smarter tools.

Branding doesn’t end at launch

We’ll still be here when you need the next thing.

One of Toast’s biggest strengths is what happens after the identity has been approved.

We don’t simply deliver the guidelines and disappear.

Our wider team works across packaging, print, campaigns, websites, digital and ongoing brand application.

So when you need another SKU, a retailer presentation, a website, campaign creative, sales materials or an entire new product range, you don’t have to start again with another agency.

We already know the brand.

Explore brand application

Food branding experience since 1997

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

We’ve been creating brands and communications for businesses since 1997.

Our experience covers startups, challenger brands, established manufacturers and household names across a wide range of food and drink categories.

You’ll work directly with experienced creatives, backed by specialists across strategy, branding, packaging, print, websites, content and digital.

That gives us the ability to create a brand from scratch and the resources to keep supporting it as the business grows.