Food and Drink
Hip Pop by Robot Food
Running a design blog sharpens your eye for category conventions. Stick with it long enough, though, and you’ll start to see those conventions unravel. What once felt fixed begins to flex. This creates a challenge for writing about design: you’re constantly assessing the landscape, but that landscape is always shifting. Take minimalism, for example. Once the dominant aesthetic of the...
Yaté by Herefor
Long gone are the days when ‘energy drink’ connoted unwashed teenage gamers, amped up Twitch streamers, hungover/still going city boys on the Tube, or 2-4-1 deals on vodka Red Bull in sticky-floored suburban student nightclubs. Like many things – such as reading books, going for a walk, or having a bath – the energy drink sphere has now collided with...
Fuku by Red Antler
Fuku (no sniggering at the back please) is a ‘fine brining establishment’ – i.e. some sort of eatery, you can safely assume – specialising in a specific type of chicken ‘sando’, or in normal language, ‘sandwich’. According to Red Antler, the Brooklyn based design agency behind Fuku’s branding, ‘the Fuku sando first hit the scene as a secret menu item...
Stuzzi by Perron-Roettinger
Hot sauce branding has long been dominated by certain overarching tropes: there’s the hyper-trad (Cholula, Tabasco, Sriracha et al); the twee of the kitchen-table-scale small-batch brigade; and the I WILL RIP YOUR HEAD OFF! camp where products have names like ‘death’. In the first and second of those camps in particular, there’s a lot of decent branding. But this new...
Bettr by Anak
Between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the coffee industry turned its attention to ‘craft’, elevating the beverage to a gourmet offering. When it came to brand storytelling, flavour notes, provenance and sustainability became key components. These features came to define what’s now known as ‘third-wave coffee’, which pre-dates the gamified science-infused ‘fourth-wave coffee’ movement in terms of textures...
Story Espresso by For the People
The unity of coffee-boffins and great typographic choices seems to be having a moment right now on BP&O. Just the other week we covered the truly superb work for Dark Arts Coffee by Not Wieden + Kennedy. Now, though, we’re heading down under – specifically to the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove, home to Story Café. Story Café opened in...
Spudos by Paul Belford Ltd
We live in chaotic and excessive times. Brands and politicians alike demand attention, clamouring for consideration and creating – quite frankly, for me at least – an unwelcome cacophony of competing voices and issues. All too often, the lines between competing interest are blurred, and even absurd. I crave clarity and simplicity, particularly when it comes to basic consumables. What’s...
Dark Arts Coffee by NOT Wieden+Kennedy
If a brand that fuses memes, hot takes, occultism, and coffee is going to succeed anywhere, it’s probably in east London. Dark Arts Coffee started out in 2014 in a Homerton railway arch, and managed to corner that distinct subgenre of goth/metal/biker-ish aesthetics which opts for craft ale over snakebite; Hackney over Camden; self-care over self-destruction. Where the old guard,...
Williams Cocktails by Offff
In the last five years, canned cocktails have become ubiquitous, with offerings from MOTH: (packaging by Pentagram) and Whitebox (cans created in-house) among the strongest designs competing on the shelves of off-licenses, delis and bottle shops. Convenience and a post-pandemic demand for ‘on-the-go’ experiences have helped drive this trend, with Mintel data demonstrating that sales of spirit-based ready-to-drink beverages increased...
Yellowbird by Gander
Sauces, oils, seasonings and condiments are consistently thriving categories in direct-to-consumer packaged goods. These high-margin, shelf-stable products can be easily differentiated with unique flavours and ingredients, and have high branding potential that can quickly adapt to trends. Right now, hot sauce its having its moment, with celebrities from Ed Sheeran to Brooklyn Beckham jumping on the band wagon, following trailblazers...
Bezi by Red Antler
Bezi was founded by Ilay Karateke – an Istanbul-raised, New York-based, ex-McKinsey consultant turned cheesemaker – and Hasan Bahcivan – a Berkeley-trained engineer from one of Turkey’s largest and most legacied cheesemaking families. Both grew up in large families, with their lives punctuated by big family-style meals shared with friends and neighbours. Labneh, a Middle Eastern spreadable cheese, was ever...
Wholy Greens by Control Studio
Wholy Greens is a B-Corp certified Dutch food brand dedicated to transforming the way people perceive and enjoy vegetables. Its mission is to create a mindset shift from ‘having to eat veggies’ to ‘genuinely loving veggies’ – and it uses pasta as its primary vehicle. It’s a smart set up, not least because, frankly, what experiences aren’t more enjoyable when...