Eat With Your Eyes creative review 2017

Food and drink has to be one of the fastest moving and creatively diverse industries to be branding. We love it! This year we’ve had so many different challenges and produced loads of great work that’s been both creative and really effective for our clients. Four more people have joined our growing team and we’ve enjoyed working with new companies and brands who have chosen to ‘eat with your eyes’. What a year.

2017 favourite projects

Little Bistro – branding and packaging

We loved creating and launching a kids’ food brand called Little Bistro, for Kiddylicious, who supply baby and toddler snacks to all major UK supermarkets and operate in over 18 countries. Probably the best brief we’ve ever had and boy did it show in the success of the range – take a look in your local supermarket or on Design Week where it featured.

Belgo – brand repositioning

Helping Belgo reposition their high street food chain with our ‘tradical’ branding approach [traditional fused with radical] was as different to Little Bistro as you can get. We decided on a Belgian restaurant specialising in craft beers just had to have the brand statement… ‘Drink beer, get mussels’. It takes a brave client to be bold with words and styling, but these guys know the importance of standing out and creating unique and compelling conversations with their discerning city customers.

Wandering Brewer Project – beer branding

The Wandering Brewer Project is a two-year collaboration between Charles Wells and Britain’s best breweries. 22 small-batch limited edition beers are being brewed monthly, until 2019. We created all the branding and are responsible for naming all 22 beers. Each beer has to begin with a letter from the Wandering Brewer Project name. Our clients are amazingly creative and loved our idea of using fluorescent pantones and lo-fi design templates to create real distinction and disruption at bars. Our favourite beer batch name so far is called ‘Wet’ which we have also managed to describe as ‘the worlds wettest beer’ in the tasting notes. 2018’s first instalment from Wandering Brewer is a beer we’ve named ‘Drink’. We love the idea of people asking for a drink. By the way, every month this stuff is outselling demand, which is fantastic and proves subversive branding can be economically as well as creatively effective. What a great client.

What’s coming in 2018

Next year is already up and running for us to be honest. We have loads of exciting projects in development that we’re chomping at the bit to launch.

Sainsbury’s will start to roll-out our merchandising standards that have been increasing sales in trial sites.

We’ve been working with Greene King for nearly a decade now and we’re welcoming in the new year by helping them further develop their Hungry Horse brand [over 300 pubs nationwide].

January will also see a new motion section for our website featuring digital and social creative content, plus the implementation of our new ‘creative fire’ initiative.

February brings the next limited-edition beer branding from the Wandering Brewer Project. The name has to begin with the letter E, so we are toying with ‘Empty’ or ‘Error 404’ at the moment.

Spring will see the launch of a new Indian grab & go concept in London we’ve done all the creative branding for – we’ll share more about this revolutionary concept when we can.

Finally, 2018 will see some interesting economic challenges for the food and drink sector but we are here to fight fire with fire. We believe in creative fire – brave, original thinking that creates true differential and ignites customers imaginations. We’ll also be keeping you up to date with all the hot topics in food, drink and branding throughout the year with our ‘weekly nibble’. Sign up for free if you haven’t already.

Here’s to a great nEW YEar.

Steve Oakey
Creative Director